









• / - ' N v \ v N v.. / , ^ - 







** 






', "^ V? 



V » t 1 






O0 N 






*.^ 












V, 






a\ 



,0 



- "^ v^ N 









^ «*' 






,A A 



,-* -c< 







A 










<p ,\A> 



^ • ^ **• 




tS : 












% A \ ^ 



LIFE'S EVENTIDE 



LIFE'S EVENTIDE 



BY 

ROBERT P. DOWNES, LL.D. 

AUTHOR OP "PILLARS OF OUR FAITH," "THE ART OF NOBLE LIVING," "PURE 

PLEASURES." "MAN'S IMMORTALITY AND DESTINY," "WOMAN: HER CHARM 

AND POWER," "HOURS WITH THE IMMORTALS," ETC., ETC. 



Grow old along with me! 
The best is yet to be, 
The last of life for which the first was made ; 
Our times are in his hand, 
Who saith: "A whole I planned, 
Youth shows but half: trust God: see all, be 
not afraid! " 

Robert Browning. 



NEW YORK: EATON & MAINS 
CINCINNATI : JENNINGS & GRAHAM 



■LfSSARY of CONGRESS? 
fwo C«oles Sacelved 

NOV I i90f 

^ CepyniM Entry 

iOcf ./S 

j CLASS/f XXc 



rtry ^ 



Copyright, 1907, by 
EATON & MAINS. 



V 



DEDICATION 

To those who in the twilight wait, 
With patient trust and hope elate, 
For entrance through the heavenly gate, 
This book I humbly dedicate. 



CONTENTS 

PAGE 

PROEM xi 

I 

GROWING OLD I 

II 
AGE AND DECAY AS THE LAW OF NATURE . 12 

III 
HOW TO BE HAPPY THOUGH OLD ... 23 

IV 
PLEASURES OF AGE 50 

V 
RELIGION AND EVENTIDE 76 

VI 

DUTIES OF AGE— 

(1) Duties toward God . . . . . -91 

(2) Duties toward our fellow men . . -102 

vii 



IS 

viii CONTENTS 

VII 

PAGE 

GROWING OLD BEAUTIFULLY . . . .118 



VIII 
THE INEVITABLE TRANSITION .... 143 

IX 
THE HEAVENLY LIFE 155 

X 
PREPARATION .170 

XI 

CERTITUDE IN RELIGION ^4 

ENVOI . . . . . . . _ , .201 



INDEX 



203 



PREFACE 

THE object of this book, written by one whose 
faith in a future life is clear and strong, 
and who himself stands in the twilight, is to provide 
some solace and inspiration to those in declining 
years. 

Age is a condition to which all but the utterly 
wretched hope to attain, yet scarcely anything has 
been provided in the way of literature for its comfort 
and encouragement. Because it touches the confines 
of life it has been treated as if it were of little 
consequence. But surely there is a reverence and 
a sympathy due to white hairs which we cannot 
withhold without dishonor. 

The consciousness of waning power, the feeling 

of loneliness as friend after friend goes forth into 

the unseen, the vague fear of the shadow which 

we call death, — these things invest the closing years 

of life with a pathos which cannot fail to impress 

the sensitive mind. 

ix 



x PREFACE 

As for ourselves, we venerate old age. If it be 
indeed second childhood, we would fain take it in 
our arms and bless it. We long to make its winter 
something other than a winter of discontent, to 
dispel its fears, and to guide its faltering steps 
toward that land of eternal youth in which our 
Father reigns, and where the sainted dead abide. 

If in these pages anything is found which may 
achieve these ends, we shall feel that we have not 
lived in vain. 

St. Clare, 

Upper Norwood. 



PROEM 

It shall come to pass that at evening time there shall be light. 
Zech. xiv. 7. 

O comrades moving toward the west, 
Whate'er our God decrees is best, 
And he who trusts in Him is blest. 

What though our day is growing old? 
The sky is flush'd with sunset gold, 
And stars are issuing from their fold. 

What though the blackbird's flutings fail? 
We hear the plaintive nightingale 
Pour witching music through the vale. 

What though dear faces smile no more, 
Which were our joy in days of yore? 
They watch for us on yonder shore. 

Why should we fear the path to tread, 
Which all the myriads of the dead 
Have traversed under Christ their head? 

Kings, sages, priests, have passed this way, 
And, freed from weakness and decay, 
Moved on into the light of day — 

The light eterne which fades no more, 
Glowing on that celestial shore 
Where seraphim and saints adore. 

R. P. D. 



LIFE'S EVENTIDE 



I. GROWING OLD 

At the setting of the sun, 

There is quiet in the air, 

The western sky is fair, 
And the toiler's work is done. 

At the setting of the sun, 

The stars begin to peep, 

The stormy passions sleep, 
And the goal of life is won. 

R. P. D. 

IT is assumed by many that nothing favorable can 
be said concerning old age, and that, therefore, 
it is a subject better left alone. It is supposed that 
declining years have no alleviations, and bear in their 
hands no blessing. Twilight brings no balm and even- 
tide no rest. Old age is only a regret. Everything 
about it makes for despondency. The limbs have lost 
their suppleness, and are often racked with pain. The 
eyes are dimmed. The keepers of the house tremble. 
Desire fails. The work of life is finished. Friend- 
ships and companionships fall off. There is no light 
upon the distant hills. The heavens are dark and 

i 



2 LIFE'S EVENTIDE 

desolate and silent. Old age, these bitter thinkers say, 
stands only for decrepitude and distrust, discontent 
and depression, peevishness and uselessness. It merely 
chafes the tenderness which counts it a religion to 
minister to its decay. 

With these conclusions we utterly disagree. Only 
minds diseased, or blind to some of life's most sweet 
and sacred associations, can reason thus. 

Rightly considered, old age represents life's ripe- 
ness, life's coronation, and should be regarded as a 
privileged and sacred thing. Gray hairs represent not 
the ravages of time, but its caresses. Aubrey de 
Vere sang: 

Smiles are the wrinkles of our youth; 

Ah, gently turn the page, 
And say that wrinkles are in sooth 

But smiles of our old age. 

The journey of life may be fitly divided into three 
stages — the period of ascent or youth, extending from 
infancy to twenty-five; that of level ground or man- 
hood, from twenty-five to fifty; and that of descent 
or decline, from fifty to seventy-five. The journey 
is sometimes abruptly terminated before old age is 
reached, and this is regarded as a calamity. Life then 
bears the aspect of an unfinished thing — a pillar left 
uncrowned, a temple not completed. Most men hope 
to attain the allotted span of threescore years and ten ; 
and where health is given and there is much to do 



GROWING OLD 3 

and to enjoy, many desire to surpass it. This wish 
for the prolongation of life proves of itself that the 
condition of advanced age is not one of wretchedness, 
and, therefore, not one to be regretted. A humorous 
public lecturer tested the interest of his deliverances 
by the number of people who went out. If life were 
not pleasant and desirable to those in declining years 
there would be a greater disposition to go out. In- 
stead of this, however, we find that the aged cling 
to life with a tenacity greater than that which we 
find in the young, and the rhyming couplet receives 
ample confirmation: 

The tree of deepest root is found 
The closest still to cleave to ground. 

Thus, when old age is reached, it is folly for men 
to complain of the condition to which they have 
ardently desired to attain. Here there is no misfor- 
tune and no tragedy. These only appear in the in- 
stance of a young and expectant life cut off before its 
prime; the setting of the sun before the vesper-bell 
has toiled. 

Old Age and Twilight 

Since man is Nature's epitome and crown, the 
microcosm, as philosophers have termed him, who 
contains in little all her principles and all her forces, 
it is not wonderful that we find in Nature many 
symbols and illustrations of his life. The mutations 



4 LIFE'S EVENTIDE 

of Nature are very largely emblems of our human 
history and progress. Among these there is none 
more fitting or more apposite than that which com- 
pares our human life to a day. We have our morning, 
our afternoon, and our evening, and then night falls 
and shuts out the earthly scene. In nature the transi- 
tion is easy and gentle, and indeed almost imper- 
ceptible. Morning glides into noon, and noon into 
eventide, and twilight comes with noiseless wing to 
master all the land, and we are well nigh utterly un- 
conscious of the gradations which have produced the 
vital change. 

So in our human life the steps of decay are gentle 
and gradual. Age creeps on shod in wool, with a 
tread so stealthy and so silent that its encroachments 
do not startle or alarm us. Some slight dimness of 
vision; some trivial lapse of memory, especially in 
the matter of names and dates; a little harder 
breathing in ascending the slope, before unnoticed; 
the intrusion of gray hairs, where before they made 
no sign; a growing disposition to sit down, and a 
more frequent invitation to sleep ; a touch of startled 
wonder when the voices of our children's children 
ring through the house; a shock of sad surprise at 
the news of the death of some contemporary, — all 
these things tell their tale, but so gently that we 
scarcely heed it. Thus, unless some serious illness 
intervene, is our descent into the valley mercifully 



GROWING OLD 5 

softened, and the darkness steals upon us almost 
unobserved. Nor does the twilight fall upon our path 
without its own accompaniments of gracious circum- 
stance and tender and significant appeal. 

There is beauty in its coming. The orb which has 
illumined the glad world sinks grandly in the golden 
west, flinging his last rich radiance on forest, field, and 
spire. New glories are kindled as the fleecy clouds 
receive the kiss of the descending sun. They burn with 
the splendor which only evening can create. Floods 
of rosy light deepening into scarlet and anon into 
crimson transfigure them as they float in the illimit- 
able blue. Like islands of the blest they fleck the 
azure sea, suggesting the Apocalypse of Patmos. The 
soul slips its cables and puts out for a celestial shore. 

Then how lovely is the effect, as when before the 
twilight fades the moon comes sailing up, lighting 
the sky anew with silvery opalescence, and mingling 
its soft luster with the fading glory of the west. 
This is the hour of poetry and silent meditation. 
Memories, associations, aspirations, regrets, how they 
pour upon us — charmed into new life by the calm 
beauty of eventide. ''This," says Dante — 

This is the hour when love of home melts through 
Men's hearts at sea, and longing thoughts portray 
The moment when they bade sweet friends adieu ; 
And Love's new pilgrim now, on his lone way, 
Thrills, if he hears the distant vesper-bell, 
That seems to mourn for the expiring day. 



6 LIFE'S EVENTIDE 

There is rest also in the coming of twilight. If 
sunrise is the song of day, sunset is its lullaby. The 
voice of the song-bird is muted and ere long falters 
into silence. The dew falls cool on panting plain and 
burning summit. The first star glimmers from the 
fainting blue upon the grave of day. There is rest 
and quiet in the air. The mower lays aside his scythe 
and the husbandman his spade. The worker leaves 
the clanging hammer and the grinding wheel. The 
city toiler hastens home where the evening lamp is 
lit and the dear ones greet him with their welcome, 
and he enjoys the sweet repose which love administers 
to the tired brain and the weary limbs. 

Thus it is in life's eventide. The heavier tasks of 
youth and manhood are abandoned. The noises of the 
world grow faint and distant. The glare of noon gives 
place to the tender gray of twilight. The gentle hand 
of God's angel of silence cools the fever of heart and 
brain. 

Nature with folded hands seems there, 
Like souls in prayer we stand. 

It is now that the Eternal Father reveals the secret 
of His presence. He shuts the door against earth's 
tumult that we may commune with Him in stillness 
and alone. The lovely intercession of darkness is as 
the shadow of His wings. It is the hour of our Bethel. 
The ladder is set up which links our low earth with 



GROWING OLD 7 

the inviolate heavens. Instinctively we breathe the 
prayer of Whittier — 

Drop Thy still dews of quietness, 

Till all our strivings cease; 
Take from our souls the strain and stress, 
And let our ordered lives confess 

The beauty of Thy peace. 

Again, twilight is the season of revelation. It 
brings with it visions of unimaginable splendor 
which were not discerned in the glare of day. It 
is when night unfolds its wonders that we measure 
the real universe. By day it is shut out. We see 
only the earth and the earthly sun. But at even- 
tide God withdraws the veil, and we learn how 
vast is His dwelling-place, how numberless and how 
glorious the "many mansions" of His house. 

Age also, to the devout and aspiring soul, is a 
season of revelation. Declining years, like declining 
day, bring more of spiritual hope and vision. Our 
outlook widens. The present world fades from us, 
but the eternal world draws nearer. Eternity lends 
its riches for the ennobling of the poverty of time. 
The cheerlessness of earth is forgotten in the mag- 
nificence overhead. 

Over us soars the Eternal Sky, 
Full of light and Deity — 

and we preen our wings for a celestial flight. 

Declining years of necessity involve less of animal 



8 LIFE'S EVENTIDE 

and mundane existence; but on the other hand, if we 
have lived wisely, they bring more of spiritual hope 
and longing. If we so desire, our twilight may be 
one from which we pass — 

Not to a night that bids the heart surrender 

The dreams of June 

To gloom that mars ; 
But to a night that crowns them with the splendor 
Of mellower moon, and brighter stars. 

Referring to a vision of Alpine peaks softened by 
the tender glow of approaching evening, John Ruskin 
says: "I am willing to let it rest on the determina- 
tion of every reader, whether the pleasure which he 
has received from these effects of calm and luminous 
distance be not the most singular and memorable of 
which he has been conscious ; whether all that is 
dazzling in color, perfect in form, gladdening in ex- 
pression, be not of evanescent and shallow appealing, 
when compared with the still small voice of the level 
twilight behind purple hills." 

Thus to the devout and trusting soul there is beauty 
and sanctity in life's eventide. It is the hour of musing 
and meditation, of adoration and of worship. The 
fever of passion is chastened. The pulse of desire is 
stilled. The twilight has healing in its restful shadows. 
It is "tired nature's bath," the anodyne of heartaches, 
the harbinger of peace, the mother's bosom where the 
tired pilgrim of eternity rests upon his journey to a 



GROWING OLD 9 

fairer world. It is true there have been vicissitudes 
and changes on the way. Fair visions of anticipated 
delight have faded like the deceitful mirage of the 
desert ; bright hopes which shone with all the hues of 
heaven have broken in the air like bubbles ; friends of 
youth and early manhood have passed into the great 
unseen: but, if the end of life has been kept in view, 
the lines of Wordsworth still throb with the music 
of tender and consoling promise : 

Thy thoughts, thy feelings shall not die, 
Xor leave thee, when gray hairs come nigh, 

A melancholy slave : 
But an old age, serene and bright, 
And lovely as a Lapland night, 

Shall guide thee to thy grave. 

It behooves us, then, to receive with meekness the 
tokens of age, and to step westward with a song of 
trust upon our lips. 

Cicero on "Old Age" 

Even paganism refutes such pessimistic conclusions 
as those to which we have referred in the opening 
lines of this chapter. Ample evidence of this is 
found in that treatise on "Old Age," from the pen of 
Cicero, concerning which Montaigne said, with par- 
donable exaggeration, that "it made him long to grow 
old." 

Cicero states four reasons why age is considered 



io LIFE'S EVENTIDE 

miserable. First, it unfits us for active employment; 
secondly, it weakens the bodily strength; thirdly, it 
deprives us of nearly all physical pleasures; fourthly, 
and lastly, it is drawing near death. As to the first, 
the writer argues very fairly that very much of the 
important business of life is transacted by old men. 
The pilot at the helm may not be able, like the younger 
sailor, to climb the rigging, but he can steer the ship. 
As to the loss of muscular vigor, he pleads that this, 
after all, is not essential to happiness. There are 
always comparative degrees of strength, and an old 
man need no more make himself unhappy because 
he has not the strength of a young one, than the 
latter because he has not the strength of a bull or 
an elephant. Then as to the pleasures of the senses, 
which age undoubtedly diminishes our power of 
enjoying, he holds that it should be esteemed 
a privilege, and not a privation, to be delivered 
from the yoke of such tyrants as our passions. 
To feel that we have got our discharge from such 
a warfare is a blessing for which men ought rather 
to be grateful to their advancing years. Further- 
more, the respect and authority which are by gen- 
eral consent conceded to old age are a pleasure 
more than equivalent to the vanished pleasures of 
youth. 

He is careful, however, to remind his readers 
that old age, to be really happy or venerable, must 



GROWING OLD n 

not be the age of the mere voluptuary or the 
profligate; that the gray head, in order to be, 
even in his pagan sense, "a crown of glory," must 
have been "found in the way of righteousness." 

In discussing the last of the evils which accom- 
pany old age, the near approach of death, the 
Roman senator rises to a level well nigh equal to 
that of the Christian philosopher who dwells in 
a light which Cicero was not privileged to see. 
The gifted and, we had almost said, inspired pagan 
will not admit death to be an evil at all. It is to 
him merely the escaping from "the prison of the 
body" — the "getting the sight of land after a long 
voyage, and coming into port." "It likes me not," 
he writes, "to mourn over departing life, as many 
men and men of learning have done. Nor can I 
regret that I have so lived that I may trust I was 
not born in vain; and I depart out of life as out 
of a temporary lodging, not as out of my home. 
For nature has given it to us as an inn to tarry at 
by the way, not as a place of abiding. Oh glorious 
day! when I shall set out to join that blessed 
company and assembly of disembodied spirits, and 
quit this crowd and rabble of life ! . . . And if 
I err in this — in that I believe the spirits of men 
to be immortal — I err willingly; nor would I have 
this mistaken belief of mine uprooted so long as 
I shall live." 



II. AGE AND DECAY AS THE LAW 
OF NATURE 

I will not rail, or grieve when torpid eld 

Frosts the slow-journeying blood, for I shall see 
The lovelier leaves hang yellow on the tree, 

The nimbler brooks in icy fetters held. 

Methinks the aged eye that first beheld 
The fitful ravage of December wild, 
Then knew itself indeed dear Nature's child, 

Seeing the common doom that all compelled. 

By one path travel all the multitudes, 
And none dispute the solemn Voice that saith : 
"Sun, to thy setting; to your Autumn, woods; 
Stream, to thy Sea; and Man, unto thy death." 

Richard Garnett. 

IT was the poet Schiller who said that death 
could not be an evil because it was universal. 
Living, as he believed, under the guardianship of 
a benevolent Deity, he could not hold that anything 
could be really evil that was the lot and destiny of 
all. 

On the same ground we affirm that old age 
cannot be really an evil, because it is universal. 
It is a part of that beneficent arrangement of 
Nature which is nothing less than the will of God 

expressed in natural things. 

12 



AGE AND DECAY AS THE LAW OF NATURE 13 

It is delightful to contemplate the appointed order 
of Nature in her alternations of Morning, Noon, and 
Night; of Spring, Summer, Autumn, and Winter. 
How wisely ordered are all her transitions, and, 
when the days are fair, what touches of beauty 
rest upon them all! As we pause to note them, 
we seem to be listening to a divine melody, a kind 
of celestial "Largo," whose measured cadences delight 
both mind and soul. Sweet is the coming of Spring, 
when softer airs breathe on the grateful soil, and the 
snowdrop peeps from the pearly drift, and the violet 
nestles by the mossy stone, and the lark pours out his 
carol of wild delight. Sweet is the coming of Sum- 
mer, with her superabounding life, her floods of melt- 
ing melody, and her masses of enchanting bloom. 
Sweet also is the coming of Autumn, the season of 
ripeness, with her mellow fruitage and her gorgeous 
decays. And, though there is silence in field and 
grove, Winter is also fair when she robes the earth 
with whiteness, weaves her delicate frost-work on 
branch and spray, and sets her glistening gems upon 
the brow of night. 

This beautiful order should be a lesson to us of 
the wisdom and beneficence which also control our 
human life and destiny. 

Not law, not fate, not fore-ordained course 
Hath molded what we are, and built the Worlds; 
But living, regnant Love. 



14 LIFE'S EVENTIDE 

While we note amid unreasoning and insensate 

things this beautiful and beneficent order, can we, 

for one moment, suppose that man — the creature who 

can love and worship — is left out of it as one neglected 

and unregarded? Is it not wiser to assume that 

because of his superiority as the "roof and crown of 

things" he is the object of a yet deeper consideration 

and a yet tenderer care? It is not pleasant to feel 

the inroads of weakness and infirmity. We do not 

like 

To watch our day 
Which kissed the Eastern peaks grow gradually gray. 

But all this is a part of that divine arrangement 
which ordains the fading leaf and appoints the 
going down of the sun. The natural mutations to 
which we are subject are all beneficently designed. 
If it is a calamity to grow old, it is a calamity to 
be born, to reach our youth, and to revel in our 
prime, for all stand together. It behooves us, then, 
to accept the inevitable with a smile, for it bears 
upon it the hall-mark of God. It is the expression 
of His will, which is love, and of His wisdom, which 
is infinite. 

"We all do fade as a leaf," and it is well it 
should be so, for were there no Autumn there could 
not be another Spring. We have sat down at the 
table of life and shared its good things in our time, 



AGE AND DECAY AS THE LAW OF NATURE 15 

and we must needs make way, without complaining, 
for other recipients of the divine bounty. Children 
have come to maturity, and need to take their 
places in the world. They also have a right to 
its enjoyments and opportunities, its dignities and 
its toils, and this cannot come to pass until the 
older generations are laid to rest. Instead of 
lamenting, therefore, over the transient nature of 
the things of this life, we should press forward to 
the better things beyond, and be thankful as we go 
that others will rise after us to catch the lamp of 
truth and bear it onward with swifter steps than 
ours. 

'Tis fitting mortal men by turns should live, 
And life's bright torch to the next runner give. 

Neither should it be forgotten that life is a school 
under a Master who does not train His pupils for the 
grave, but for fuller life and finer activities in a 
grander world. This divinely ordered succession is 
educating us by varied discipline and noble service for 
celestial ministries, and is multiplying the number of 
the "solemn troops and sweet societies" who gather in 
the Father's house on high. 

They are proud and peevish children of the race, 
and foolish as they are proud, who desire to evade 
the natural order of things, to be something more 
than human — angels in the flesh, and immortals 



i6 LIFE'S EVENTIDE 

habited in dust. No thoughtful man would accept 
life in this world except on the conditions of age, 
and the change, which we call death, through which 
this mortal puts on immortality. And why should 
we shrink from the great transition? 

It is not sad to turn the face toward home, 
Even though it shows the journey nearly done; 
It is not sad to mark the westering sun, 
Even though we know the night doth come. 
Silence there is indeed for song, 

Twilight for noon; 
But for the steadfast soul and strong, 
Life's Autumn is as June. 

The Common Lot 

There is yet another consideration which should 
weigh with us in submitting patiently to the great 
and sacred processes of life, and this is, that they are 
the common lot. From these processes there is no 
exemption. In this realm there are no favorites. 
All who are mortal, and thus appointed to pass 
"through nature to eternity," must bear this burden. 
Kings, in their order, grow old and die like other 
men; and though Popes may assume the possession 
of the keys of heaven, they must still surrender them 
at the touch of death, as the husbandman lays down 
his spade at night-fall, or the child its toys when 
slumber seals the eyelids. 

Where are the countless millions who have wept 



AGE AND DECAY AS THE LAW OF NATURE 17 

and toiled and cherished high ambitions since the first 
man looked upon the sun — 

The patriarchs of the ancient world, the kings, 
The powerful of the earth, the brave and strong, 
Fair forms and hoary seers of ages past? 

They have played their part in the great world-drama, 
and now lie down in one mighty sepulcher. 

This feeling of the transitory, and of the rapid flight 
of ruthless time, is very strong in Omar Khayyam. 
His perception of it leads him to pour contempt upon 
the pomp of kings. Thus he writes : 

Think, in this batter'd caravanserai 

Whose portals are alternate night and day. 

How sultan after sultan with his pomp 
Abode his destined hour, and went his way. 

They say the lion and the lizard keep 

The courts where Jamshyd gloried and drank deep ; 

And Bahram, that great hunter — the wild ass 
Stamps o'er his head, but cannot break his sleep. 

"Go," said Saladin, when dying, to one of his 
heralds. "Go ! fasten the shroud in which I shall soon 
be wrapped, to thy lance, and proclaim to the people 
that this is all which remains of Saladin and all his 
greatness." Yes ! 

Earth's highest glory ends in ''Here he lies," 
And "dust to dust" concludes her noblest song. 

Very significant is one of the incidents which take 



18 LIFE'S EVENTIDE 

place in the ceremony of the consecration of a new 
Pope. As the procession of princes, nobles, cardinals, 
patriarchs, and bishops, with the new Pontiff at their 
head, moves toward the papal throne, a pause is made 
at the reputed tomb of St. Peter. There the chaplain 
of the Sistine Chapel holds up a reed surmounted by 
a handful of flax, which, lighted by a taper, fixed on 
another reed, flares up for a moment, and then dies 
out. This is done three times, while the chaplain 
chants in Latin the monitory words: "Holy Father, 
so passes away the glory of the world." 

Yes ! "age and decay on all around we see." They 
are the common lot of humanity, and since we are 
human we cannot be immune from the common 
destiny. 

Meeting the Inevitable 

It is the misfortune of old age to be generally un- 
welcome, with some noble exceptions among those 
who believe that God makes no mistakes and inflicts 
no cruelties. Emerson says with quaint humor: 
"Few envy the consideration enjoyed by the oldest 
inhabitant." Solomon called the days of old age evil 
days, when we shall have no pleasure in them. "Very 
miserable," wrote Voltaire, in the diary of his later 
years. Ruskin, in one of his letters, refers to his 
"sadness at growing old." Thackeray, in the same 
mood, speaks of "the black care that rides behind 



AGE AND DECAY AS THE LAW OF NATURE 19 

his chariot." Dr. Johnson admits the same bitterness, 
and we cannot wonder that he wished to pause awhile 
in the enjoyment of peace and prosperity after his 
siege of battling days. Charles Dickens writes : "The 
old post-chaise gets more shattered at every turn of 
the wheel. Windows will not pull up; doors refuse 
to open and shut. Sicknesses come thicker and faster; 
friends become fewer and fewer/' Standing, full of 
years and honors, by the lagoons of Venice in the 
evening breeze, Chateaubriand said : "The breeze that 
blows upon a hoary head blows from no happy shore/' 
Charles Lamb pathetically writes: "In proportion as 
the years both lessen and shorten, I set more count 
upon their periods, and would fain lay my ineffectual 
finger on the spoke of the great wheel. I am not con- 
tent to pass away 'like a weaver's shuttle/ ... I 
am in love with this green earth, the face of town 
and country, the unspeakable rural solitudes, and the 
sweet security of the streets. . . . I do not want to 
be weaned by age, or drop, like mellow fruit, as they 
say, into the grave." Very plaintive, again, are the 
lines of W. E. Henley, written in the twilight of his 
strenuous life — 

Gray head, gray heart, gray dreams — 
Oh, breath by breath, 

Night-tide and day 

Lapse gentle and gray, 
As to the murmur of tired streams, 
Into the haze of death. 



20 LIFE'S EVENTIDE 

Talleyrand, the famous French diplomatist, was a 
man who always kept in power, no matter what 
dynasties rose and fell. He was deputy in the French 
Revolution, minister under Napoleon, prince under the 
Bourbons. He was educated for the Church, but cast 
off his allegiance to it, and was known as altogether 
corrupt and unscrupulous. He lived long, and in 
luxury and ease; and on his eighty-third birthday 
he wrote in his journal these doleful words: 
"Eighty-three years of life are now past; filled with 
what anxieties, what agitations, what enmities, what 
troublous complexities ; and all this with no other 
result than a great weariness, physical and moral, and 
a profound sentiment of discouragement with regard 
to the future, and of disgust for the past." (Thomas 
Carlyle wrote in his last days : "I am much bankrupt 
in hope and heart ; a gloomy, serious, silent old man, 
gazing into the final chasm of things, and holding 
mute dialogue with Death, Judgment, and Eternity." 

But there are other and wiser moods than these. 
W. E. H. Lecky, one of our latest philosophers, 
writes : "Old age, when it is free from grave infirmi- 
ties, and from great trials and privations, is the most 
honored, the most tranquil, and perhaps, on the . 
whole, the happiest period of life. The struggles, 
passions, and ambitions of other days have passed. 
The hallowing touch of time has allayed animosities, 
subdued all asperities of character, given a larger and 



AGE AND DECAY AS THE LAW OF NATURE 21 

more tolerant judgment, and cured the morbid sensi- 
tiveness that most embitters life." Mrs. Somerville 
said "she wished she could persuade young people 
that to be old is not so terrible as they think." The 
Abbe Morellet declared that "if God were to permit 
him to return to earth in whatever shape he might 
choose, he should prefer to return to it an old man." 
'George Macdonald wrote: "I am growing old, and 
it's about time to be going home." Later on he said : 
"How strange this fear of death is ! Yet we are never 
frightened at a sunset!" A Christian philanthropist 
said in extreme old age: "Sailors on a voyage drink 
to 'friends astern' till they are halfway across; and 
after that it is 'friends ahead.' With me it has been 
'friends ahead' for many years, and I shall soon join 
them on the eternal shore." j Marcus Aurelius wrote: 
"Spend your brief moment according to Nature's law, 
and serenely greet the journey's end, as an olive falls 
when it is ripe, blessing the branch that bare it, and 
giving thanks to the tree that gave it life." Words- 
worth thus treats of declining years — 

Rightly it is said 
That man descends into the vale oi years, 
Yet I have thought that we might also speak 
Of Age as of a final Eminence . . . 
On which 'tis not impossible to sit 
In awful sovereignty; a place of power, 
A throne. 

As honey from the lion's mouth are the lovely 



22 LIFE'S EVENTIDE 

words of Dante: "In old age the noble soul renders 
itself unto God, and awaits the end of this life with 
much desire; and to itself it seems that it goes out 
from the Inn to return home to the Father's mansion ; 
to itself it seems to have come to the end of a long 
journey, and to have reached the City; to itself it 
seems to have crossed the wide sea, and to have 
returned into the port." Then, as a last song of vic- 
tory from the lips of an old Christian warrior, take 
the lines written by Dr. Adam Clarke toward the close 
of life in the album of a friend : 

I have enjoyed the spring of life; 
I have endured the toils of summer; 
I am passing through the rigors of winter; 
And I am neither forsaken of God 

Nor abandoned by man. 
I see at no great distance the dawn of a new day, 
The first of a spring that shall be eternal; 
It is advancing to meet me : 

I haste to embrace it ! 
Welcome! Welcome, eternal Spring! Hallelujah! 



III. HOW TO BE HAPPY 
THOUGH OLD 

Life's Summer has its golden days, 
And children love, and poets praise 

Its sunshine and its flowers; 
But Autumn, too, has its delights, 
In tranquil days, and peaceful nights, 

And meditative hours. R. P. D. 

Bless me in this life with but peace of my conscience, com- 
mand of my affections, the love of Thyself and my dearest 
friends, and I shall be happy enough to pity Caesar. These 
are, O Lord, the humble desires of my most reasonable 
ambition. — Sir Thomas Browne. 

HUMAN life, if rightly ordered, has happiness 
for each of its stages. The vale of years 
need not be "a vale of tears." Those who find it 
so have either fallen into the common error of 
expecting too much from life, and have in con- 
sequence been disappointed, or by a petulant and 
exacting temper have turned its sweets into bitters. 

The first thing we need to realize is the fact that in 
this life we cannot look for perfect happiness. Per- 
fect felicity is reserved for a diviner world. Of the 
majority of men, however, it may be confidently 
said that their joy in life has considerably out- 

2 3 



24 LIFE'S EVENTIDE 

weighed their sorrow. Happiness has been the rule 
with them, misery the exception. 

The blue of heaven is larger than the cloud. 

The world has proved to them a very good world 
to live in. Life has been for them a pleasant journey, 
with many a lovely prospect by the way, many a 
poppy laughing in the corn, and many a bird-note 
ringing in the copse. Nor have the things which 
made for happiness perished with advancing years, 
though something of their early zest may have 
departed. 

It must be remembered, however, that happiness in 
age is something which needs to be cultivated, and not 
a condition which comes by accident. The world we 
tread is not a world of chance, but a world of order 
pervaded through and through by moral purpose. It 
is a system of nice adjustments and perfect balances, 
where honest labor receives its reward, and patient 
waiting brings the watcher victory and peace; where 
seeming drawbacks have their compensations, and 
where courtesy and kindness and fidelity bring forth 
fruit according to their kind. 

We continually blame fortune for things adverse 
and distressing in our lot which were entirely under 
our own control and for which we are alone respon- 
sible. That is a striking text, "The foolishness of 
a man perverteth his way, and his heart fretteth 



HOW TO BE HAPPY THOUGH OLD 25 

against the Lord." Men are continually fretting 
against God for trials and calamities which are the 
fruit of their own doings — the bitter harvest of the 
seed which they themselves have sown. | 

Happiness in old age is a thing which needs to be 
cultivated, a thing which demands reflection. It calls 
for a careful consideration of what should be sought 
and what should be avoided. 

Physical Health 

To begin with, the question of physical health in 
its bearing on happiness in age must be regarded as of 
the first importance. To have preserved, after the 
lapse of three-score years, or more, a sound mind in a 
sound body is a cause for deepest thankfulness, and 
the continuance of such conditions is a result to be 
ardently desired. To this end due regard must be 
given to the primary laws of health. The neglect of 
obedience to these laws is a common source of painful 
and premature decay. 

Sir Benjamin Richardson relates a conversation 
which he had with an engineer in charge of a large 
stationary engine. This man told Sir Benjamin 
that his engine had been working true as steel for 
ninety years. And "do you know," he added, 
"during that time it had eight masters, all of whom 
are either dead or worn out; and yet it goes on 
as if it was as young as ever." "But this," said the 



26 LIFE'S EVENTIDE 

doctor, "is no puzzle to me. The engine has worked 
a good many hours a day I do not doubt, but 
always equably. It never ran loose; it was true 
to its vocation; it was clean in every point; it 
was served with the best but simplest fuel-food; 
it had its furnace-tubes clear; it was saved from 
friction by having its parts oiled; and it drank 
nothing but water. In short, it has made the most 
of its physical life. But its masters, alas! did not 
make the most of their lives. They might have 
been industrious, but they were not so orderly, so 
true, so steady, so clean as the engine they had in 
charge! They had not learned so well how to 
find the best food and drink for their own labor as 
for that of the engine." 

Rules for the attainment of longevity are abundant. 
The following, from Sir John Sawyer, where he 
deals with the question as to how a man may live 
a hundred years, seem to us to be full of wisdom. 
"Take eight hours' sleep. Sleep on the right side 
of the body. Keep the bedroom window open 
all night. Do not take a cold bath in the morning, 
but one from which the chill is removed. Take 
exercise before breakfast. Eat little flesh meat, 
and that well cooked. Drink no milk. Eat 
fat to feed the cells which destroy disease germs. 
Avoid intoxicants, which destroy those cells. 
Take daily exercise in the open air. Allow no 



HOW TO BE HAPPY THOUGH OLD 27 

animals in your living room. Take frequent 
short holidays. Limit your ambitions. Keep 
your temper." 

All these counsels are wise, and special heed 
should be taken of that which restricts in declining 
years the quantity of food. Those men live longest, 
and enjoy the fullest measure of activity, who do 
not overtax their enfeebled powers of mastication 
and digestion. When the lamp burns low it needs 
less oil to sustain its flame. 

Human Interests 

Yet, further, to be happy though old, it is needful 
to live outside ourselves, or, in other words, to keep 
in touch with human life and human interests. The 
solitary heart does not contain resources enough 
for its own blessedness, it must go out of itself if 
it would find materials for joy. \ We need to escape 
from self-concentration and introspection into those 
social relations which are among the master-facts 
of humanity. We need to keep our natures 
magnetized by contact with our fellow men. A 
single coal will not suffice for a winter's fire. We 
must join it with others to get warmth out of it. 
By coming into touch with others and helping them 
as far as in us lies, our own personality is enlarged 
and enriched. We have no such thing as a distinct 
or divided interest from our race. Their welfare is 



28 LIFE'S EVENTIDE 

ours also; and by choosing the best paths to secure 
their happiness, we choose the surest way to our 
own. 

Seldom can a heart be lonely, 

If it seek a lonelier still; 
Self-forgetting, seeking only 

Emptier cups with love to fill. 

That was an excellent recipe given by the brusque 
but wise physician, Dr. Abernethy, to a discontented 
woman full of imaginary ailments: "Go and do 
something for somebody." 

It is unquestionable that the secret of a bright, 
full, and contented age is found in the continuance — 
mildly and quietly, it may be — of all the interests 
of the active world. Those who are growing old 
must not, unless utterly infirm, allow the rising 
generation to push them from their stools. The 
degenerative stages which constitute senility are 
hastened by the lack of occupation, and especially 
of mental occupation. In the matter of growing 
old it is chiefly "thinking which makes it so." We 
withdraw from life and life withdraws from us. We 
must pursue our occupations and interests with 
ardor; and above all we must look forward. So 
long as a man has a purpose before him he keeps 
young. For this reason, unless they have other 
sources of interest, it is not wise for those in declining 
years entirely to relinquish business life. We have 



HOW TO BE HAPPY THOUGH OLD 29 

known men who retired from their ordinary occupa- 
tions at sixty return to them again through the sheer 
lack of interest in existence. 

Exercise a Glad Receptivity 

Yet, further, if we would be happy though old, we 
must be receptive. A swift response is needed to 
everything of interest which comes our way. Our 
time is short; let us, therefore, make haste to seize 
the remaining good of life. It is a pitiful thing to 
find a lovely spirit among men like James Smetham, 
the artist, writing, "I have touched the joys of exist- 
ence with a timorous finger" ; or to hear David Scott, 
another artist, saying, ("Joy hath passed me like a 
ship at sea.") The question we feel constrained to ask 
is "Why?" 

We are too apt to forget that joy is not merely 
a privilege but also a duty. It honors God, who never 
intended that His children should be unhappy, and 
least of all those whom He has guided for so long, 
and who are near their final home in His presence. 
Amid the manifold duties which press upon us, we 
are very apt to forget the duty of happiness. It is 
not only our right, but our duty, to enjoy, for glad- 
ness of heart is a form of thanksgiving to God, while 
at the same time it radiates gladness on those around 
us. 1 The man whose morals have made him melan- 
choly does not recommend virtue to his fellows, and 



30 LIFE'S EVENTIDE 

• . v 
the discontented cynic is a kill- joy in the world. "We 

live by admiration, hope, and love," said Wordsworth, 

and there is no reason why these should decay when 

we grow old. 

There is some satisfaction as age steals on in 

feeling that during the period allotted us in 

the world we have lived and not merely existed. 

So felt Walter Savage Landor when he wrote the 

lines : 

I strove with none, for none were worth my strife, 

Nature I loved, and, after Nature, Art; 
I warmed both hands before the fire of life, 

It sinks, and I am ready to depart. 

"I am not afraid to die," said Dr. Punshon in his 
last illness, "but, oh, the rapture of living!" Life is 
sweet — indeed, we never really seem to know how 
sweet until we are leaving it. Let us, therefore, take 
joy home. Let no pleasant experience which comes 
our way find the door of our heart closed against it. 
Let us keep open house for the spirit of delight. 
Let us welcome every sunbeam which glints forth 
on us from the bars of sunset. Let every shy grace 
or gleam of love and sympathy which comes to us 
on dove-like wings find some niche wherein to rest 
as twilight falls. If the lark is in the sky, let us 
soar and rejoice with it. If any human voice comes 
forth to us in blessing, let it be as if an angel spake. 
If a little child looks up into our face wondering 



HOW TO BE HAPPY THOUGH OLD 31 

if we were ever children, who are now so changed, 
let us take the little one in our arms and bless it. 
Let us shake off lethargy and dullness, and keep 
our capacity for gladness free, open, and buoyant 
to the last. Let us welcome all sights and sounds 
"which give delight and hurt not." All kindly greet- 
ings, sunny hopes, and glad surprises; all beauties 
of heaven and earth; the laughter and the play of 
childhood; the pride of youth exulting in its 
strength; the bashful grace of maidenhood; the 
father's noble forethought and unselfish toil; the 
mother's watchful tenderness and yearning pity; 
the great man's service for the State; the artist's 
quest of ideal beauty; the stalwart toiler's rugged 
majesty, — let none of these things appeal to us 
without response. We do not admire the genius of 
Robert Browning more than the spirit in which he 
sang: 

I find earth not gray, but ros3% 
Heaven not grim, but fair of hue. 

Do I stoop? I pluck a posy. 
Do I stand and stare? All's blue. 



The Spirit of Content 

Another excellent recipe for happiness in old age 
is the cultivation of the spirit of content and thank- 
fulness. The desire to be something which we are 
not and which others are is a fruitful source of unrest 



32 LIFE'S EVENTIDE 

and misery. What matters it now we have reached 
the verge of life? Let us sit down in the porch and 
thank God for the hearts that love us, and for the 
sunshine and the flowers. As for those who have 
succeeded in the things in which we have failed, they 
have paid the price and should not be envied. We 
would fain be rich, but, "having food and raiment, 
let us learn therewith to be content." It is a wise 
thing in our outlook on life to look on those who 
have been less fortunate than we, rather than on 
those who have been more fortunate. Many murmurs 
have been hushed by a visit to a hospital or an 
asylum. Sadi, the Eastern sage, says in the Gulistan: 
"I never complained of the vicissitudes of fortune, 
nor murmured at the ordinances of Heaven, except- 
ing once, when my feet were bare, and I had not 
the means of procuring myself shoes. I entered the 
Great Mosque at Cufah with a heavy heart, when I 
beheld a man there who had no feet. I then offered 
up praise to God for His bounty, and bore with 
patience the want of shoes.'^ 

It is important always to remember that it is what 
we are which makes us rich or poor, and not what 
we own. A true and lofty life may be attained in 
comparative poverty. There is no proportion to 
be established between wealth and nobleness. The 
fairest life ever lived on earth was that of a poor 
man. An excellent essay might be written under 



HOW TO BE HAPPY THOUGH OLD 3 3 

the title, "Things I can do without." A man approxi- 
mates to the Deity by the fewness of his wants. How 
wise the prayer, "Give me neither poverty nor riches" ! 
The middle path is best. ) 

Nothing that is outside a man can make him rich 
or restful. The treasures which are kept in coffers 
are not real, but only those which are kept in the soul. 
"The fountain of content," said the wise Dr. John- 
son, "must spring up in the mind; and he who has 
so little knowledge of human nature as to seek happi- 
ness by changing anything but his own disposition 
will waste his life in fruitless efforts, and multiply 
the griefs which he purposes to remove." The 
amenities of our civilization are such that a man with 
a very modest income may be passing rich by avail- 
ing himself of the privileges within his reach. A 
story is told of a French marquis of the old regime, 
bearing with serenity his descent from wealth to a 
slender competency. If he had lost his chateau in 
the country he had half a dozen royal palaces, as 
it were, at his command. He had Versailles and 
St. Cloud for his country resorts, and the shady alleys 
of the Tuileries and the Luxembourg for his town 
recreation. Thus all his promenades and relaxations 
were magnificent, and yet cost nothing. "When I 
walk through these fine gardens," he said, "I have 
only to fancy myself the owner of them. All these 
gay crowds are my visitors, and I have not the 
3 



34 LIFE'S EVENTIDE 

trouble of entertaining them. All Paris is open to 
me, and presents me with a continual spectacle. Upon 
the whole I cannot but look upon myself as a person 
of singular good fortune." There is a charm in the 
legend which tells how a peasant woman entertained 
unawares a heavenly visitor. When departing in the 
morning the celestial visitant offered to grant the 
woman who had sheltered her anything she might 
desire. The woman replied that she had daily bread, 
sufficient clothing, good health and the hope of heaven, 
and inquired, in surprise, as to what she could want 
more. 

There is peril in high place, and the wise man will 
not sigh for it. A student of the correspondence of 
Napoleon I, after noticing that the expressions of ten- 
derness which marked his earlier letters became rarer 
and rarer as he advanced in power, justly added that 
his career reminded him of the ascent of a mountain, 
where flowers at the base please both the eye and the 
soul of the traveler, but gradually disappear, until 
toward the summit nothing is found but the cold gran- 
ite and the brooding storm-cloud. 

We do not need to mount a throne and leave it, in 
order to exclaim with Joseph, King of Spain, when he 
surrendered his uneasy monarchy, "In forty years of 
life I have learned only what I knew at the beginning 
— that all is vanity except a good conscience and your 
own self-approbation." 



HOW TO BE HAPPY THOUGH OLD 35 

Writing in the Spectator, Addison says : "I once 
conversed with a Rosicrucian about the great secret. 
He talked of it as a spirit that lived in an emerald, 
and converted everything that was near it to the 
highest perfection it was capable of. 'It gives a luster/ 
said he, 'to the sun, and water to the diamond, and 
enriches lead with all the properties of gold. It 
heightens smoke into flame, flame into light, and light 
into glory/ He further added that a single ray dis- 
sipates pain and care and melancholy from the person 
on whom it falls. 'In short,' said he, 'its presence 
naturally changes every place into a kind of heaven/ 
At length I found that his great secret was nothing 
else but content." 

Meek Submission to the Inevitable 

A fruitful cause of unrest and unhappiness is the 
conflict some men wage with the inevitable. There 
are untoward events in the life of each of us which no 
wisdom could foresee, which no prudence could avoid, 
and which confront us with all the obduracy of a 
granite wall. With these events we must not presume 
to set ourselves in conflict. They must be accepted 
as a part of the will of God with regard to our destiny, 
and not as something with which we need to wage 
petulant and unceasing war. 

Montaigne tells how the Thracians, when it thun- 
dered or lightened, fell to shooting against heaven 



36 LIFE'S EVENTIDE 

with titanic madness, as if by their arrows they would 
reduce the Deity to reason. He also relates a story of 
a king who, having received a blow from the hand 
of God, swore he would be revenged, and to that end 
issued a proclamation to the effect that for the space 
of ten years the worship of Jehovah should be sus- 
pended in his dominions, and none should pay Him 
homage. 

If we value our peace we must learn, with the best 
grace we can command, to acquiesce in the inevitable. 
That which we cannot evade we must endeavor, as 
meekly as possible, to bear. He who hurls a goblet 
against a granite cliff does not hurt the cliff but the 
goblet, and if we in our insensate folly hurl ourselves 
against the inevitable we shall not affect it, but it will 
shatter us. 

It is true that it is not pleasant to have our wills 
crossed, our ambitions thwarted, our purposes clothed 
with defeat. But the wisdom of God is above our 
folly, and did we possess His knowledge we should 
sing anthems of praise at the shrine of divine neces- 
sity. A saint of the Orient wrote: "Do thou only 
not withdraw thy neck from the yoke of God, and 
nothing shall be able to withdraw its neck from thy 
yoke." The universe keeps step and chime with him 
who accepts the will of God as the best of all con- 
ditions, and who never knows what it is to set himself 
in rebellion against it. The will of the God we 



HOW TO BE HAPPY THOUGH OLD 37 

worship is our happiness, our highest well-being, and 
therefore we do well to acquiesce in it. There was a 
splendor in the conception of the great Greek drama- 
tist when he made Prometheus rebel against the decree 
of Jove, for that decree was cruel and unjust, and 
the torture inflicted on the hapless victim was vin- 
dictive and meaningless. In that case rebellion was a 
virtue. But "the God and Father of our Lord Jesus 
Christ" is no barbaric deity, possessed only by an 
inscrutable self-will which is determined to have its 
way with us whether that way be just or not. On 
the contrary, He is the universal Father, all whose 
purposes are essential love, and therefore it is our 
wisdom to accept His decrees, since they order 
only that which is best for us. To quote from Owen 
Meredith : 

Man cannot make, but may ennoble fate 
By nobly bearing it. So let us trust 

Not to ourselves, but God, and calmly wait 
Love's orient out of darkness and of dust. 

A Trustful Attitude Toward Sorrow 

Another help to happiness in declining years is the 
acceptance of trial and sorrow as a divine discipline. 
We frequently chafe at trial and sorrow, but they 
would not be so common if we did not need them. 
Each life must have its De Profundis, that it may 
reach the heights it needs to scale. The shadow of 
the lark in the tarn goes as deep as the height at 



38 LIFE'S EVENTIDE 

which the bird is soaring. We frequently live under 
a cloud. It is well we should do so. Unbroken sun- 
shine would parch our hearts. We need shade and 
rain to cool and refresh them. "We can hardly," 
says George Eliot, "learn humility and tenderness 
enough except by suffering." Those are, for the most 
part, hard and unsympathetic souls which have never 
felt the mellowing and consecrating touch of sorrow. 
By the laying on of its hands we are made priests of 
the Eternal. Sorrow, in this life, is a sacred and 
necessary thing. We have been redeemed by sor- 
row. We have only to look back on our past life 
to realize what we owe to sorrow as a spur to noble- 
ness, and purity, and trust. We have needed all our 
sorrows. If we have suffered much it is because there 
were idols, standing between us and God, which 
needed to be shattered; ties binding us to earth, and 
time, and transitory things, which needed to be 
loosened. The bitter cup we have had to drink was 
not a poison, but a medicine. The deep wound in- 
flicted was not for death, but for healing. The knife 
was hard to bear, but the cancer it cut out meant cor- 
ruption, emaciation, death. The present pang has 
brought about the eternal healing. 

Who of us has fathomed the meaning of all that 
God has suffered us not to do, and not to be? The 
train we missed was wrecked. The pleasure which 
was denied us was poisoned. The anticipated 



HOW TO BE HAPPY THOUGH OLD 39 

fortune which was snatched from us was a weight 
which would have dragged us down. The love we 
lost was evil. We are God's workmanship, and 
have been chiseled by His unerring hand out of 
the hard, resisting stone, that needed so many 
strokes of the sculptor ere the angel within could 
be unveiled. 

'Tis Sorrow builds the shining ladder up, 
Whose golden rounds are our calamities, 
Whereon our firm feet planting nearer God 
The spirit climbs, and hath its eyes unsealed. 

Sorrow is not an accident. It is not a blind fury 
slinging flame. It is God-sent, and sent for purposes 
worthy of God. "Whom He loveth He chasteneth." 
The great calamity would be to be left alone. 
"Sweet are the uses of adversity." It is as the tool 
of the lapidary, which removes its incrustations and 
makes the diamond flash and gleam. It is as the 
crushing of the aromatic plant, which brings out its 
fragrance. It is as the shaking of the torch, which 
brightens its flame. It is the blast as on a tree, which 
strengthens the fibers and deepens the roots of virtue. 
Let us, then, face the battle-music with the warrior's 
heart. 

Well to suffer is divine: 

Pass the watchword down the line, 
Pass the countersign "Endure!" 

Not to him who rashly dares, 

But to him who nobly bears, 
Is the victor's garland sure. 



40 LIFE'S EVENTIDE 

The Question of Temper 

One of the very first conditions against which we 
need to watch in declining years is that of a peevish 
and exacting temper. The world is like a mirror. It 
gives back to us our own reflection. If we scowl 
at it, our answer is a scowl. If we smile at it, our re- 
sponse is a smile. We must not expect from others 
a courtesy and a consideration which we refuse on 
our part to extend to them. We must not imagine 
that, however churlish and unpleasant we may be, we 
shall yet receive from others the tenderest and most 
thoughtful treatment. The world was not created 
for our special convenience, or mankind for our sub- 
jects and our servants, and the sooner we learn this 
the better for our peace.} 

There is much truth in the saying that most men 
are made wretched not so much by their troubles as 
by their tempers. Certain it is that if we would be 
happy though old we must avoid a proud, petulant, 
and exacting temper. We must not be for ever stand- 
ing on our dignity and demanding from those around 
us more of homage or of service than they should be 
expected to render. 

Shakespeare's "King Lear" stands forth as the 
everlasting type of a foolish, petulant, and exacting 
old age. Lear's first blunder is shown in the opening 
of the tragedy, where, while yet vigorous in intellect 



HOW TO BE HAPPY THOUGH OLD 41 

and strong in will, he surrenders the care of his king- 
dom to his daughters, becoming, in the words of the 
Fool, who is not only the jester, but the critic of the 
play — "a sheal'd peascod." The King thus expresses 
his resolve: 

'Tis our fast intent 
To shake all cares and business from our age ; 
Conferring them on younger strengths, while we 
Unburden'd crawl toward death. 

We next note in Lear the inconsiderateness which 
demands from his children a homage and a devotion 
greater than they are likely to render. "I gave you 
all," he says in a moment of passionate frenzy, and 
because he did that he expected that they would give 
him all, unmindful of the fact that they had other 
interests, apart from his, in their life. Futhermore, 
in his selfish petulance he forgets the great principle 
that in human nature the ascending love is always less 
than the descending love — the love of the parent for 
the child naturally greater than the love of the child 
for the parent. In the profound words of the Fool — 
"He has made his daughters his mothers" — a relation 
which they cannot, in the nature of things, be expected 
to sustain/" 

Yet further, while Lear has voluntarily surrendered 
his kingship he still remains in spirit and in temper 
every inch a king. He exacts from those around 
him an absolute and unquestioning obedience. It 



42 LIFE'S EVENTIDE 

is indeed no small charge for his daughters to enter- 
tain him and his train of followers, but of this he is 
utterly regardless. For what do they exist but to min- 
ister to the comfort of their father? In his first en- 
counter with Goneril we find how this spirit manifests 
itself. He returns with his train from hunting, and 
his usual impatience breaks out in the petulant utter- 
ance, "Let me not stay a jot for dinner; go, get it 
ready." 

Tired of his importunity, Goneril at last resolves to 
resist his unreasonable demands. A heated dialogue 
takes place, in which she resents the liberties he takes 
with her household, charges his followers with riot 
and disorder, and expresses her desire that their num- 
ber should be decreased. On this — with all that 
violent impetuosity with which he has already spurned 
the faithful Cordelia from his presence — because, with 
a touch of his own obstinacy, she would not share in 
the hollowness of her sister's pretensions — he bids 
avenging destiny visit Goneril with the direst strokes 
of doom — 

That she may feel 
How sharper than a serpent's tooth it is 
To have a thankless child! 

From Goneril the infuriate old king speeds to the 
house of his second daughter, Regan, who sustains 
her sister's quarrel, and bids him, if he desires to 



HOW TO BE HAPPY THOUGH OLD 43 

find shelter in her house, dismiss his following alto- 
gether and trust to her own servants for ministry 
to his needs. 

On this Lear is chafed into absolute madness. He 
exposes his white head to the tempest, blends his 
curses with the bellowings of the storm, and in his 
insane fury seeks to cast himself from the summit of 
Dover Cliff that he may end his life and his miseries 
together. We compassionate the sorrows of Lear and 
condemn the conduct of his elder daughters, while 
at the same time we feel that his miseries are in a 
very large degree the outcome of his own violent im- 
petuosity, and selfish, unconquerable pride. Through 
Shakespeare's subtle mastery this pride further mani- 
fests itself in the bold appeal of the frenzied monarch 
to universal Nature to make his cause her own. He 
will be king of the very elements, and so he bids 
the nimble lightnings wreak his vengeance on his 
ungrateful offspring, and calls upon the heavens to 
compassionate his white hairs, since they themselves 
are old. 

We cannot withhold our pity from the distracted 
King, yet it is clear that he is the author of his 
own distressful fate. Forgetting that family love 
must be based on mutual consideration and unselfish 
reciprocity and not on arbitrary decrees of duty 
and obligation, he wrecks alike his palace home and 
the palace of his own great heart by his petulant 



44 LIFE'S EVENTIDE 

passion, his exacting selfishness, and his unreasoning 
pride. Truly — 

Endurance is the crowning quality, 

And patience the grand passion of great souls. 

Sad Memories and Vain Regrets 

To secure happiness in age it is further needful 
to waive aside sad memories and vain regrets. Age 
is a period in which memory is very busy, almost, 
indeed, to the extent of predominance over every 
other faculty; and the retrospect of a long and 
battling life must include some, if not many, things 
which tend to depress and discourage. When 
Simonides offered to teach Themistocles the art 
of remembering, the latter said: "Teach me rather 
the art of forgetting." There are some of our 
yesterdays which refuse to look backwards with a 
smile. Things have been done in the inexperience 
of youth, or in moments of unreasoning passion, 
which we would give all we possess to recall. 
Wasted and, it may be, sinful hours cry out against 
us. There is many a man who wears a shirt of 
sackcloth under fine linen. There is many a man 
who would be willing to stand up in the world 
friendless and penniless, if by so doing he could 
blot out, with all its bitter consequences, an unworthy 
past. The path of the penitent wrongdoer in 
Tolstoi's Resurrection is one which many would 



HOW TO BE HAPPY THOUGH OLD 45 

gladly, tread if it might only lead to the restoration 
and uplifting of a trusting human soul injured and 
led astray. 

When a friend of Tallyrand said he had been guilty 
of only one wickedness in his life, Tallyrand replied, 
"And when will it end?" This is the consideration 
which crushes many a heart. That mean, degrading, 
harmful action, "when will it end?" We cannot say. 
But it is enough if the transgressor feels that he 
would rather die than be guilty of that action again. 
Furthermore, the remorse felt may prove an incentive 
to future nobleness. "Repentance " writes John 
Sterling — 

Repentance clothes in grass and flowers 
The grave in which the past is laid. 

There is nothing to be done save to atone for the past 
by unremitting fidelity in the future. The remaining 
years of life may be few, but divine music may be 
brought out of them. Every hour given to unswerving 
right is of precious consequence. 

On one occasion as Paganini, the great violinist, 
stood before an expectant audience he handled his 
instrument so awkwardly that he snapped a string. 
Then, flurried and excited, another and yet another 
jangled and gave way. At last there was but one 
left; but genius was not to be baffled by misfortune, 
for, straightening himself up, the master swept his 



46 LIFE'S EVENTIDE 

bow over the remaining string, and drew forth from 
it such exquisite and ordered melody that his audi- 
ence was mastered by his spell. Is there but one 
string in life left unbroken? Then let us put our 
soul into that and charm it into conquering melody. 
Ignorant and imperfect creatures, if we accept life, 
we must also accept regret. There are few sadder 
words in our language than the words "Too late!" 
When this sad knell rolls out upon us it is needful 
to remember that no mere momentary folly, no 
isolated act, can fix a destiny. "No evil," says one, 
"dooms us hopelessly except the evil we love and 
desire to continue in, and make no effort to escape 
from." When we see our sins, and repent of them 
and hate them, then the hand of God Himself blots 
them out. "If God," says Thomas Erskine, "had not 
told a man that his sins are forgiven, it would be 
presumption in him to believe that they are forgiven; 
but if God has told him that they are forgiven, then 
the presumption consists in disbelieving and doubting 
it." And what God blots out, we are justified, as 
far as in us lies, in forgetting. "Forgetting the things 
which are behind," said St. Paul, "I press toward the 
mark for the prize of my high calling." He did 
not linger with the pains of memory. His former 
blasphemy and bigotry; his persecution of the 
saints; his scorn of Jesus of Nazareth; his hate 
of the gospel of the Cross, — these things he labored 



HOW TO BE HAPPY THOUGH OLD 47 

to forget, and pressed after nobler things. And we 

act wisely in forgetting, as far as that is possible, 

the follies of our youth, the failures of our manhood, 

and in pressing toward the mark of holy living, 

assured that — 

He who aspires unweariedly 
Is not beyond redeeming. 

The Avoidance of Worry 

Another condition of happiness in old age is the 
avoidance of worry. Montaigne says: "There is 
always something that goes amiss. I steal away 
from occasions of vexing myself, and turn from the 
knowledge of things that go amiss." Worry frets 
life as the moth a garment. Small anxieties may 
demand some consideration, but they should be 
dismissed at the point where thought becomes unduly 
disturbing and begins to dissipate the peace of life. 
It is pitiful to note how with many people we meet, 
the merest trifles are allowed to ruffle temper and 
destroy happiness. They waste in worry energies 
which, if directed into right channels, would prove 
most helpful and productive. Ever a hindrance and 
not a help, worry never accomplishes anything. It 
saps and undermines character and acts as a blight 
upon our mental faculties. It poisons the springs of 
existence. 

Thousands make themselves old with imagined 



48 LIFE'S EVENTIDE 

aches and pains and anticipated distress. They are 
continually scaling difficult heights which have not 
yet even appeared on the horizon. "Sufficient unto 
the day is the evil thereof," and we act most unwisely 
in bringing the anticipated difficulties of the coming 
month into today. 

Furthermore, anticipation often creates the misery 
it looks for. If we think we are sick, we shall be 
sick. If we anticipate decrepitude, it will run to 
meet us. If we suspect our friend of coldness and 
indifference, we shall shun him and lose him. "Life 
and health excepted," says Montaigne, "there is noth- 
ing for which I will bite my nails, and that I will pur- 
chase at the price of torment and distress of mind. 
... I hate a froward and despondent spirit, that 
slips over all the pleasures of life, and seizes and feeds 
upon misfortunes." 

Worry is waste. Like grit in a machine, it prevents 
the true adjustment of life, and wears out its finer 
parts. Nothing consumes the vigor of life like the 
fretting violence of the emotions of the mind. 
Continual anxiety and care will soon sap the most 
vigorous constitution. "It is not intellectual work," 
says a medical expert, "which injures the brain, but 
emotional excitement. A fit of rage has cost many 
a man his life. Most men can stand the severest 
thought and study of which their brains are capable 
and be none the worse for it; for neither thought 



HOW TO BE HAPPY THOUGH OLD 49 

nor study interferes with the recuperative influence of 
sleep. It is ambition, anxiety, and disappointment, the 
hopes and fears, the loves and hates of our lives, that 
wear out the nervous system and endanger the balance 
of the brain." He, therefore, who strives after a long 
and pleasant term of life, must seek to live at peace 
with himself and his environment, and avoid all worry. 
Great Nature is ever teaching us this lesson of toil 
united with tranquillity. 

It is beautifully enforced by Matthew Arnold in 
the lines : 

Weary of myself, and sick of asking 

What I am, and what I ought to be, 
At the vessel's prow I stand, which bears me 

Forwards, forwards, o'er the star-lit sea. 

And a look of passionate desire 

O'er the sea and to the stars I send : 
"Ye who from my childhood up have calm'd me, 
Calm me, ah, compose me to the end. 

"Ah, once more," I cried, "ye Stars, ye Waters, 
On my heart your mighty charm renew : 
Still, still let me, as I gaze upon you, 
Feel my soul becoming vast like you." 

From the intense, clear, star-sown vault of heaven, 

Over the lit sea's unquiet way, 
In the rustling night air came the answer: 

"Wouldst thou be as these are? Live as they." 



IV. PLEASURES OF AGE 

I am o'ercanopied with Beauty's tent, 

Through which flies many a golden-winged dove, 

Well watched of Fancy's tender eyes upbent; 

A hundred Powers wait on me, minist'ring; 

A thousand treasures Art and Knowledge bring; 

Will, Conscience, Reason, tower the rest above; 

But in the midst, alone, I gladness am and love. 

Dr. George Macdonald. 

I sleep, I eat and drink, I read and meditate, I walk in my 
neighbor's pleasant fields, and delight in all in which God 
delights — that is, in virtue and wisdom, in the whole creation, 
and in God Himself! And he that hath so many causes of 
joy, and so great, is very much in love with sorrow and 
peevishness, who loses all these pleasures, and chooses to sit 
down on his little handful of thorns. Jeremy Taylor. 



SOLOMON imperilled his reputation for wisdom 
when he said of the days of age that we should 
find no pleasure in them. It was the judgment of 
a pessimist and a voluptuary. By reason of failing 
strength and subdued passion the pleasures of the 
senses may fail, but there are still pleasures of, the 
mind, the heart, and the soul which abide with us. 
The time for pure pleasures never passes away. 
The nobler joys of life do not fade, but rather grow 
and strengthen with increasing years. If we give 

50 



PLEASURES OF AGE 51 

full play to our higher powers, to the affections, the 
intellect, and the spiritual capacities of our being, 
we shall never lack pure and elevating joys. In the 
matter of pleasure we must keep in view our splendid 
human heritage with its manifold avenues of joy. 
We do not travel on the limited pathway of the brute. 
We can think, and aspire, and worship. We have 
esthetic, emotional, intellectual, moral, and spiritual 
faculties ; and from each of these, as from perennial 
fountains, pure pleasures may be drawn. Our 
many-sidedness, as beings made in the likeness of 
God and thus endowed with universal aptitudes, is the 
attestation of our manifold capacity for joy. If we 
give our spiritual energies full play, if we live not 
only on the ground floor of our nature but also in 
those loftier rooms which look out upon the in- 
finite, it is difficult to place a limit on our nobler 
pleasures: they embrace God Himself and flow out 
at last into the ocean of His beatitude — into the sub- 
lime and measureless Kingdom where "there is 
fullness of joy, and where there are pleasures for 
evermore/' 

Home Sanctities 

Our higher and purer pleasures begin with the 
home, and these do not fade with the changing 
years, but sweeten and ripen to the end. Love is 
the first sweet gift of life, the first joy the infant feels 



52 LIFE'S EVENTIDE 

when it nestles near the mother's heart, and the last 
joy to fade as, with the hand of a loved one in ours, 
we pass into the great unseen; nay, then it does not 
fade, but is only made immortal. How enrich- 
ing and ennobling is the influence of spirit on spirit 
among 

those we love — 
The dear religions of our heart. 

A true marriage is not merely a matter of the flesh; 
it is a union of souls, a blending of kindred natures 
made one for ever. It is on this union that the sancti- 
ties of home are built. There we are met in our return 
from daily toil with 

Those sunshine looks 
Whose beams would dim a thousand days. 

There our sorrows are divided and our joys are 
doubled. There our pathway has been strewn, as 
with spring flowers, by a thousand 



Little, nameless, unremembered acts, 
Of kindness and of love. 



There we have heard our children's feet upon the 
stairs, and have seen with a delight, not unmixed with 
awe, the angel of their birth and path bending over 
their sleeping forms in holy supplication. There we 
have become "the liegemen of love" until the tresses 



PLEASURES OF AGE 53 

of gold faded into the silver, which was as the dawn 
of another life. There, together, we have seen our 
children grow up into manhood and womanhood, and, 
together, blessed them as they went out into the bat- 
tle of life. There, by tenderness, and gentleness, and 
loving counsel, and wise restraint, we have laid up 
treasures of affection and devotion which enrich us 
now the twilight shadows fall. There, with the 
world of strife shut out, and the world of love shut 
in, we have learned that life has no purer, deeper 
happiness than that which dwells in the inglenook at 
home. 

If wisdom and love have made our home some- 
thing worthy of that name — which is among the 
sweetest of our language — at its door all the burdens 
drop off, as they will one day do at the gate of 
heaven. And this happiness does not decay as we 
grow old, but is more sweetly realized in age, when 
the bark does not so often dare the sea but clings 
to the haven — the haven of the household hearth. 
Truly, to the quiet and loving spirit, next to the haven 
of heaven, is the haven of home. Safe-sheltered here, 
we know they greatly err who say of the days of age 
that we find no pleasure in them. And though we 
must needs confront that tragedy, which our mutual 
love has deepened, that one must go first, that 
same love teaches us that it is only for a little 
while. 



54 LIFE'S EVENTIDE 

Varied Interests 

Nor are those of home the only interests which 
remain in the eventide of life. The path to some 
form of pure and rational enjoyment is never closed 
against a man unless he closes it against himself. 
Much, of course, depends upon the tastes which 
have been cultivated and the habits which have 
been formed before age steals on, but there is 
always some pursuit which may be followed, and 
some taste which may be gratified, if a man 
has lived sanely and thoughtfully. How often 
does a busy man feel that if he had leisure and 
opportunity he would like to study Nature in her 
ministries of use and beauty, or to taste the 
sweets of literature, or to acquire some elementary 
knowledge of science, or to give some attention to 
history, or philosophy, or theology ! Wonderful 
indeed is the record of men who, regardless of 
advancing years, have kept up their interest in 
life and widened the area of their knowledge and 
achievement. Socrates in his old age learned to 
master an instrument of music. Benjamin Franklin 
was over fifty before he gave any serious attention 
to philosophic pursuits. Ronsard, the father of 
French poetry, did not develop his poetical faculty 
until late in life. Arnauld translated "J ose P nus " ' m 
his eightieth year. Hobbes published his transla- 



PLEASURES OF AGE 55 

tion of Homer when he was over eighty years of age. 
Chevreul, the great French scientist, worked on until 
he was nearly ninety. Goethe was fourscore when he 
completed the second part of Faust. The lapse of 
time need not of necessity make a man old. That 
which makes men old at sixty, in the sense of the loss 
of hope and energy, is not time, but the consuming 
action of evil passions, or the neglect to nourish the 
mind with wisdom. 

Joy in Nature 

One of the richest pleasures which we are privi- 
leged to bear with us from youth into age is that of 
delight in the varied spectacle of Nature. He can 
never be bereft of restful and elevating satisfactions 
who is able to say with Wordsworth: 

For me 
Life's morning radiance hath not left the hills, 
Her dew is on the flowers. 

The grand, pure, tender mother, ancient in years 
but ever young, it is her lovely office to lead us 
through all the years of life from joy to joy. And 
this joy comes not merely from visions of the 
beautiful in Nature, but from the fact that we and 
Nature are akin. Man is Nature's child. Her 
blood flows in his veins. Her magnetism streams 
from his brain. Her elements sustain his life. The 



56 LIFE'S EVENTIDE 

human form\, the human face, the lips and eyes of 
beauty, all come from the mighty and mysterious 
alembic of Nature. She first builds us up by her 
vital forces and then enchants us with her splendor. 
She is not only mother but lover also, bending over 
us in witching tenderness from the fathomless bosom 
of the sky, from the outspread arms of the forest 
trees, and from the glory of the everlasting hills. 
We do not need to wander wide for our delight. 
Crabbe says with truth: 

All that grows has grace; bog, marsh, and fen 
Are only poor to undiscerning men. 

"To the attentive eye," says Emerson, "each moment 
of the year has its own beauty; and in the same 
field it beholds every hour a picture that was never 
seen before, and shall never be seen again." In the 
minute, as well as in the magnificent, the death- 
less charm of Nature is revealed. So he felt who 
wrote : 

Peering into the daisy's crown 
Until its wonders deep have grown 
A mighty gulf to drink us down. 

"The fool's eyes are in the ends of the earth," says 
the greatest of all books. There are many who fancy 
they must take a journey of a thousand miles to find 
the beautiful and to rejoice in it. But the wise, who 



PLEASURES OF AGE 57 

love the beauteous world, and whose souls respond to 
its simplest manifestations of loveliness, can find a 
pageant which enchants in the most familiar walks 
and ways. An appreciative biographer of Dr. New- 
man remarks concerning him: "The walk from 
Oxford to Littlemore, especially if taken every other 
day, might be thought monotonous ; but it never palled 
upon Newman. The heavens changed if the earth 
did not, and when they changed they made the earth 
new. His eye quickly caught any sudden glory or 
radiance above; every prismatic hue or silver lining; 
every rift, every patch of blue; every strange con- 
formation, every threat of ill or promise of a higher 
tone. He carried his scenery with him, and on that 
account had not the craving for change of residence, 
for mountains and lakes, which most educated people 
have. His visits to country parsonages sometimes 
took him into districts singularly wanting in features 
constituting scenery and landscapes. But even on 
Salisbury Plain, where there are no trees, no hedges, 
no water, no flowers, no banks, no lanes, and now 
not even turf, and seldom even a village or a church 
in sight, he would walk or run with a friend as 
cheerfully as the prophet ran before the king from 
Carmel to Jezreel to announce the opened gates of 
heaven." 

The enjoyment of Nature is a delight beyond all 
price, and is as open to us as the sky which is her 



58 LIFE'S EVENTIDE 

unfathomable dome. The humble pedestrian sees 
more of her than the rich man who flashes through 
her solitudes in a motor-car; and the lover of her 
beauty, though he may have but a few pence in his 
pocket, is master of unsearchable riches. It would 
need a volume to express Nature's varied service for 
her human child. A few months before his death 
Joseph Jefferson advised a friend, as soon as he was 
past seventy, to cultivate a garden. "The saddest thing 
in old age," he said, "is the absence of expectation. 
You no longer look forward to things. Now, a 
garden is all expectation; therefore I have become 
a devoted gardener." 

Delight in Nature is specially suited to advancing 
years, because it is not exhaustive but restorative. It 
not only gladdens, but invigorates. All sensual and 
impure pleasures rob men of strength and fiber. Nay, 
even pleasures which are not sensual, such as public 
festivals, theaters and music, take as much from us as 
they give. But air and light, and the rejoicing sea 
and the eternal sky, refresh instead of exhausting 
us. We grow younger in their presence. We gather 
vigor by returning to the elements from which we 
came, as Antaeus, the wrestler of the Greek mythology, 
renewed his strength when he touched his mother 
earth. 

There is pathetic beauty in the lines which the 
poet places in the lips of a Nature-lover who comes 



PLEASURES OF AGE 59 

to her with the faltering steps and the tired heart of 
age seeking rest and healing: 

Will you make me whole again, 

Silent hills and sunny land? 
Broken dreams I bring to you, 
Who the first young rapture knew — 

Will your pity understand? 

Will you fold me close again? 

For I'm wearying to come, 
Just to lay me on your breast, 
In your quiet and your rest, 

Like a child come home. 

Then, again, our appreciation of the beautiful in 
Nature grows with what it feeds on. She ushers us, 
as our love deepens, into a world which is fuller of 
beauty than we had ever dreamed. We behold, as we 
move on, yet fairer skies, and richer landscapes, and 
stiller waters, until we are prepared by her lofty minis- 
trations for the transfiguring grandeur of the beatific 
vision — the vision of the face of God. 

Of the tranquillity which Nature breathes much 
might be written. When we go forth from the noisy 
city into her calm solitudes we learn her power to 
"quiet the restless pulse of care." In her company 
we keep perpetual Sabbath. 

The passing winds sing vesper hymns to us, 

And the old woods seem whispering, "Let us pray !" 

Night brings to us as many solemn and restful 
thoughts as she wears jewels in her diadem, and 



60 LIFE'S EVENTIDE 

we enter into the deep meaning of the poet's evening 
orison : 

Teach me your mood, O patient stars, 
Who climb each night the ancient sky; 

Leaving on space no shade, no scars, 
Nor trace of age, nor fear to die. 

The Companionship of Books 

Good books, like Nature, are a source of unfailing 
refreshment and delight. Dr. Johnson, when asked 
who he thought was the most unhappy man, replied: 
"The man who cannot read on a rainy day." A man 
retired from more active business life, if he has 
acquired the habit of reading, finds in it a distraction 
from anxiety, a comfort in petty troubles, a defense 
against weariness and ennui, and a society of choice 
spirits which he can take up when he will and leave 
without offence. He may be of retiring disposition, 
yet he can keep the very best of company. He can 
have Job, Isaiah, Milton, Bunyan, Jeremy Taylor, 
Wordsworth, and Tennyson in his dwelling, and a 
hundred more of a like order if he cares to seek them. 
From the pages they have written these gifted minds 
will look out upon him in all their power and beauty, 
undimmed by the faults and follies of earthly exist- 
ence, consecrated by time. In such companionship 
he will learn the truth of the assertion of Heraclitus, 
that "no one, by whatever road he may travel, could 



PLEASURES OF AGE 61 

ever possibly find out the boundaries of the human 
soul." "Books," says Hazlitt, "let us into the souls of 
men, and lay open to us the secrets of our own. They 
are the first and last, the most home-felt, the most 
heart-felt of all our enjoyments." 

The most sacred thing under heaven, after the Word 
of God, is the word of man; the communication of 
his soul to others for their refreshment and uplifting. 
The best of pleasures can be found in books. Said 
Lady Jane Grey: "I wist, that all their sport in the 
park is but a shadow to that pleasure I find in Plato." 
And such is our own glorious literature that we need 
not turn to other tongues than ours to find delight and 
profit. In our own English language we may read 
by hundreds books which inspire and ennoble; which 
dispel our melancholy by their wit and humor; 
which place before us in review the events of past ages ; 
which open up for our wonder the secrets of Nature ; 
which recall heroic deeds and brave unselfish lives; 
which find us in our deepest selves, and which teach 
us how to live and how to die. "Books," says 
Wordsworth — 

Books we know, 
Are a substantial world, both pure and good; 
Round which with tendrils strong as flesh and blood, 
Our pastime and our happiness will grow. 

In his last illness Herder cried: "Give me a great 



62 LIFE'S EVENTIDE 

thought that I may refresh myself with it." Thus 
does age need to be refreshed by those 

Great thoughts which always find us young 
And always keep us so. 

It is on these and not on the mere froth of literature 
that we need to feed as we step westward toward the 
setting sun. Such thoughts are a precious medicine 
for the heart, conquerors of care, recreators of tired 
and desponding souls, comforters of the lonely who 
sit musing in the twilight. 

"There are few voices and many echoes," says 
Thomas Carlyle, and when our time is short we must 
attend to the voices and disregard the echoes. We 
have only time to deal with the great books, the 
original books, the fountain-heads of light and lead- 
ing. We want to know something of the books which 
refresh and strengthen, which inspire hope and cour- 
age, which transfigure the world to our thought, which 
give a noble and divine interpretation to life, which 
make the future beautiful and bring it near. 

Sacred Books 

First and foremost among the books most suitable 
for those in declining years are those which witness 
of divine and eternal things. As we go down to the 
valley where the sleepers lie we need to be sure of 
the soul and very sure of God. We need to cast 



PLEASURES OF AGE 63 

anchor within the veil, to ponder the truths and the 
issues of the solemn and momentous after-life toward 
which we are speeding. 

The children on the shore, who have just arrived, 
may play with the pebbles or build with the sand, 
but we are about to take sail, and must scan the 
horizon and give heed to the compass and the chart. 
What of the land ahead? — of the King who governs 
it and of the society of which it is composed? What 
of the laws of that kingdom and of the sanctities 
which make it venerable? Is there any helpful utter- 
ance concerning these things, and if there is, where 
may it be found? This question brings us to the 
Bible as the most vital and important of all books 
because of its lonely preeminence over all other 
messages and voices which the eager heart of man has 
interpreted as oracles of God. In the loftier utterances 
of this book it is clear that man does not ascend to 
God, but God descends to man. This book takes us 
up where human knowledge leaves us, shedding upon 
our path and destiny a light unattainable by the unas- 
sisted intellect of man. It is not too much to say that 
it answers the profoundest questions of the intellect 
and meets the mightiest needs of the soul. It is the 
only book which will bear the whole weight of our 
human life with its longings, its mystery, and its 
tears. 

The Imitation of Christ, by Thomas a Kempis, 



64 LIFE'S EVENTIDE 

is another volume, worthy to lie side by side with 
the Bible. It is now commonly accepted that this 
devotional masterpiece is not the product of a single 
brain, but the work of a devout compiler who has 
sifted for his own soul's need the precious grain 
given for the spiritual life of the world by the older 
mystics. Souls which sigh for purity and conformity 
with the Divine Will cannot fail to find in the 
proverbs and axioms of this book a stimulus 
to saintly living of the very finest order. Bunyan's 
Pilgrim's Progress is another most helpful volume 
for the old man's book-shelf. Most of us have read 
in childhood this immortal allegory, quite uncon- 
scious that a devout wisdom underlay its pictures 
and its symbols, which would instruct us in after- 
years. Breezes from Paradise fanned the cheek of 
the inspired tinker in his lonely vigils in Bedford 
jail, and he has become for us the great pioneer 
of the King's Highway, leading us through sloughs 
of despond and castles of despair into the Beulah 
Land beyond the stars. There is no clearer ex- 
position of essential Christian truth than that which 
this book contains. He who ponders it will not 
fail to find his way either to the Cross or to the 
Crown. 

Sincerely anxious not to over-burden or dis- 
courage those for whom we write, there are only 
five other devotional books to which we will give 



PLEASURES OF AGE 65 

special prominence, and these are Pascal's Thoughts, 
Faber's The Creator and the Creature, Martineau's 
Endeavors after the Christian Life, the Sermons of 
F. W. Robertson, of Brighton, and Dale's The Living 
Christ and the Four Gospels. 



The thirst that from the soul doth rise, 
Doth ask a drink divine — 



and it will not be mocked at these fountains of instruc- 
tion and inspiration. If we seek a touchstone for 
religious reading we shall best find it in a choice of 
the books which present to us a worthy conception of 
God. 

"God is light, and in Him is no darkness at all" — 
no darkness of injustice, no darkness of cruelty, no 
spirit of malice or revenge. He pities His human 
children as a Father, and will not break the bruised 
reed of their feeble purpose, or quench the smoking 
flax of their uncertain love. We must learn to inter- 
pret Him not through any pitiless creed of purblind 
theologians, but through what is noblest and divinest 
in ourselves. 

History and Biography 

It is difficult to advise men of varied capacity and 
taste on the subject of reading. In this realm, to 
quote from Carlyle, "a man ought to examine and 

5 



66 LIFE'S EVENTIDE 

find out what he really and truly has an appetite 
for." There is much inspiration and help, however, 
to be obtained from the kindred studies of history 
and biography. History is a potent inspirer of faith, 
hope, and patience. It teaches us how the law of 
righteousness is woven into the constitution of things. 
It shows us that "the mills of God grind slowly," 
but, nevertheless, very surely. It demonstrates the 
fact that the conditions of human life cannot be 
changed in an hour by the stroke of a pen or the 
fiat of a legislature, and, therefore, that we need not 
only to labor, but also to wait. It reveals to us the 
truth that a law of progress governs the movements 
of history, and that, dark and ominous as the pres- 
ent outlook may be, the former days were not better 
than these. Thus we gather from its pages the 
confidence of hope, and confidently look forward 
to that 

One far-off divine event, 

To which the whole creation moves. 

Not less inspiring is the study of the great men 
who have either made or molded history. History 
indeed is often best studied through biography: 
to know the great men of any period is to know 
that period better than it can be learned in any other 
way. 



PLEASURES OF AGE 67 

Poetry 

The finest fruit of our British literature is found 

in its poetry. The poets are "great truth-tellers." 

By that inspired insight, which we call genius, 

they lead us into the very heart and soul of things. 

They lift the veil from the hidden beauty of the 

world — 

Clothing the palpable and the familiar 
With golden exhalations of the dawn. 

Much of their attractiveness is owing to that charm 
of rhythmical expression by which their utterances 
of truth and beauty come to us like music. They 
blend the teachings of wisdom with the melody of 
song. Some suppose that poetry is merely the voice 
of passion and imagination, but the loftiest poetry also 
moves in the sphere of highest truth. "No man," says 
Coleridge, "was ever yet a great poet without being 
at the same time a profound philosopher; for poetry 
is the blossom and fragrance of all human knowl- 
edge." In this enchanted region we are compelled 
to acknowledge the power of masters such as Shake- 
speare, Milton, Wordsworth, Tennyson, and Robert 
Browning, all of whom are a part of our glorious 
literature. 

Those who seek a simpler music, yet a music rich 
in the solace of immortal hope, will find it in the 
two American poets Longfellow and Whittier, while 



68 LIFE'S EVENTIDE 

we strongly recommend for the devotional reading 
of those in declining years The Treasury of Sacred 
Song, compiled by Francis T. Palgrave, and the choice 
collection of Hymns and Spiritual Songs used in the 
Methodist Church. This book, in the edition of 1875, 
was highly esteemed by W. E. Gladstone, and ever 
kept at hand. 



Books of Entertainment 

The selection of books of entertainment must be 
left to readers themselves. We cannot, however, 
ignore the fruitful and enchanting realm of modern 
fiction, by which we are moved to laughter, to tears, 
and to stirrings of deepest thought. 

What lovely and heroic forms wait upon our bid- 
ding in the pages of such writers as Scott, Thackeray, 
Dickens, Balzac, Victor Hugo, George Eliot, and a 
host of other masters of fiction not less worthy of 
mention ! The Great Teacher expressed many of His 
profoundest truths in parable, and it is foolish to 
deprecate or ignore the choice spirits who, by their 
works, have created thousands of readers who other- 
wise would scarcely have taken up a book at all, and 
who have instructed and heartened for the battle of 
life millions who else might have fainted in the way. 
To adapt to our purpose a few pathetic lines from 
Shelley : 



PLEASURES OF AGE 69 

Many a green isle needs must be 
In the deep wide sea of misery; 
Or the mariner, worn and wan, 
Scarce would care to voyage on. 



How often do we find our great masters of fiction 
writing with a serious and noble purpose which keeps 
chime with the very best utterances from the pul- 
pits of our land! With what beautiful persistence 
Dickens has enforced the claims of neglected chil- 
dren in our slums and alleys and borne witness to 
the tenderness and the chivalry which reign in many 
a lowly home! Thackeray, again, has written as in a 
frieze of fire on the walls of our mansions the story 
of how society decays when it becomes insincere, 
and given over to petty ambitions and to outside 
show. Les Miserables of Victor Hugo exhibits the 
evolution of conscience; The Scarlet Letter of Haw- 
thorne, the evolution of pain and penalty; and the 
Romola of George Eliot, the evolution of sin 
and the peril of tampering with the sanctities of 
conscience. 

Who can study creations such as these without 
realizing that pulpits are not the only places where 
divine truths are proclaimed, or doubt for a moment 
that the novel, in noble hands, may be a great 
teacher ? 

Thus the aged, as long as vision is lent them, or a 
single ministrant loved one remains at their side, need 



70 LIFE'S EVENTIDE 

spend no weary or unprofitable hours. The resources 
at command are ample — 

To give the soul the best delight that may 
Encheer it most, and most our spirits enflame 
To thoughts of glory, and to worthy ends. 



Pleasant Memories 

Among the precious things of age are its precious 
memories of joys which, like faded rose-leaves kept 
in silver bowls, retain their perfume still. To the 
power of memory it is given to rebuild the vanished 
past, and the hundred-gated Thebes was not so 
densely peopled as is this enchanted realm. He is 
the happiest man in declining years who has enjoyed 
the largest number of pleasant experiences, and 
retains them vividly before his mind. "It is good 
for us," says one, "to dwell on the happy memories 
of the past. It is right that, as Wordsworth says, 
we should wish our days to be 'bound each to 
each with natural piety/ We should read our own 
childish letters and those we received from our 
parents. There is profit in keeping awake early 
memories and revisiting old haunts. To do this 
softens the heart, revives and warms the affections. 
How many little links of sympathy and comradeship 
bound us once to the brothers and sisters whom 
we now see perhaps three or four times a year! 



PLEASURES OF AGE 71 

Do we love them as much as ever? And, if so, would 
it not be possible to draw a little closer to them? 
Our past should be a holy temple haunted by 
gentle spirits." 

It is true that there is a touch of sadness in all 
retrospect. We cannot contemplate without a sigh 
the treasures which have slipped from us and left 
us with empty hands. We all feel the simple and 
appealing pathos of the lines in which the poet 
recalls the days of childhood and of youth: 

Ah ! happy hills, ah, pleasing shade, 

Ah, fields beloved in vain; 
Where first my careless childhood strayed 

A stranger yet to pain ! 

Because of this tender vein of sadness it has been a 
subject of frequent debate as to whether the pleasures 
of memory really out-balance its pains. But when 
life has been so spent that our yesterdays can look 
backward with a smile, we think the balance is in 
favor of pleasure. 

It is sweet to taste in thought again the peace 
and purity of the old home. The joy of our father's 
blessing; the heaven of our mother's smile; our 
brother's chivalry; our sister's clinging trust; the 
dear companons of our youth; the glad hours 
spent 'neath sunny skies, in bosky woods, on Alpine 
heights, in famous cities, by lapsing streams, or by 
the whispering sea; our first wild love, with all 



72 LIFE'S EVENTIDE 

its rapturous promise; the bliss of wedded days, 
when home was paradise: the struggle which won 
for us comfort or affluence; the books which 
greatened, the hopes which cheered, the aspirations 
which ennobled us ; the echoes, still fresh, of the 
orator's noble passion, the preacher's tender entreaty, 
the singer's haunting melody, and the composer's 
inwoven harmonies; the intercourses of friendship 
by which our hearts have been gladdened and our 
minds enriched; the service we have rendered out 
of a kind heart for those less fortunate than 
ourselves; the poor man's blessing; the lonely 
woman's grateful tears ; the child's sweet benedic- 
tion; the loving and most tender intervention of 
the Providence in whose exquisite regards the very 
"hairs of our head have been all numbered" — which 
has pitied our weakness, pardoned our offences, and, 
by a thousand thoughtful ministries, saved "our souls 
from death, our eyes from tears, and our feet from 
falling," — all these recollections make for happiness 
in age and awaken in us that still small voice of 
gratitude which is the sweetest incense we can send 
up to heaven. 

The Joy of Helpfulness 

There can be no doubt at all that helpfulness is 
happiness. If we are allowed a period of rest and 
meditation after the toil of life is over, we can 



PLEASURES OF AGE 73 

covet no deeper joy than that of service for our fellow 
travelers toward eternity. George Macdonald sweetly 
said: "If I can put some touches of a rosy sunset into 
the life of any man, then I feel that I have walked 
with God." There is no finer antidote for the perilous 
stuff which haunts the worn heart and will not let 
it rest than kindly service toward others. And the 
time for such service is never past. Nay, the oppor- 
tunity is more precious and the more eagerly to be 
seized when the possibilities of such service are fast 
slipping from our grasp. 

To lay up lasting treasure 
Of perfect service rendered, duties done 
In charity, soft speech, and stainless days: 
These riches shall not fade away in life, 
Nor any death dispraise. 

Contrary to all earthly dynamics, the more burdens 
we carry for our fellow men the lighter our own 
become. Keble (the poet) says: "When you find 
yourself overpowered by melancholy, the best way 
is to go out and do something kind to somebody or 
other." In his Counsels of Happiness, F. Parnell 
says: "When I dig a man out of trouble, the hole 
he leaves behind him is the grave in which I bury 
my own trouble." A self-centered life is a life nar- 
row, pinched, and of little value. To be joyous, rich, 
and beautiful, it must enlarge itself by service. Sym- 
pathy gives us new interests. It rescues our life 



74 LIFE'S EVENTIDE 

from isolation. The little eddy no longer moves upon 
itself in monotonous and melancholy circles, but es- 
capes to the broad, rejoicing sea. It is by effort for 
the good of others that men increase in love, and 
experience more and more the power of that life which 
enriches poverty and transmutes suffering into joy. 
Life cannot be dull or sad if sweetened by service. "A. 
man," says Sir Arthur Helps, "who is weary of life 
may be sure that he does not love his fellow creatures 
as he ought." 

Love, going forth in service, is the finest fruit of 
life. It is the essence of all true nobleness. In its 
exercise we feel the pulsation of the mighty heart of 
God. We share His joy. We enter, in a measure, 
into the glory of the divine beatitude. 

Furthermore, we receive from others exactly that 
which we send to them — love for service, blessing 
for ministry. As we gently take the trembling 
hand which seeks our guidance, virtue comes forth 
from it to make us rich and glad. There is no good 
deed which is interred with our bones. No kindly 
act can ever die. It flows from heart to heart, 
and makes the whole world richer. Stretch out 
your hand in loving-kindness, and a hundred will 
grasp it. Sing one song of trust and hope, and 
a hundred will take up the melody and send it down 
the years. Do one real deed of Christ-like service, 
and it will not only prove a gift of bread, but of 



PLEASURES OF AGE 75 

seed-corn which shall produce a harvest after its 
own kind. We receive as we give, only in richer 
measure. 

There are loyal hearts, there are spirits brave, 
There are souls that are pure and true ; 

Then give to the world the best you have, 
And the best will come back to you. 

Give love, and love to your heart will flow, 

A strength in your utmost need; 
Have faith, and a score of hearts will show 

Their faith in your word and deed. 

Give truth, and your gift will be paid in kind, 

And honor with honor meet; 
And a smile that is sweet will surely find 

A smile that is just as sweet. 

For life is the mirror of king and slave, 

'Tis just what we are and do; 
Then give to the world the best you have, 

And the best will come back to you. 



V. RELIGION AND EVENTIDE 

What though the wheels of life run slow, 

And I am growing old; 
What though my locks are fleck'd with snow, 

And I am growing old: 
I trace beyond this scene of care, 
A life more perfect and more fair; 
In that serene, eternal air, 

Where none are growing old. 

R. P. D. 

The older I grow — and now I stand on the brink of eternity 
— the more comes back to me the sentence in the Catechism 
which I learned when a child, and the fuller and deeper its 
meaning becomes — "What is the chief end of man?" "To 
glorify God and enjoy Him for ever." And surely this is the 
beginning and the end, — the Alpha and Omega of that strange 
indefinable thing which we call life. 

Thomas Carlyle. 

THIS great utterance from the sage of Chelsea 
cannot be too deeply pondered. It contains 
in germ the whole secret of that profound reality 
which we call religion. That reality is composed 
of two supreme conceptions, the perfection of God, 
and a life beyond the grave in which the human 
spirit will be linked with God in a perfect and 
eternal fellowship. These are the grandest, and 
because the grandest the most ennobling conceptions 
which appeal to our thought and affect and control 
our destiny. He only is wise who, apprehending 

76 



RELIGION AND EVENTIDE 77 

their- absolute and unparalleled import, shapes his life 
in harmony with them. He who ignores them walks 
in a vain show, however imposing his earthly state 
— he does not truly know himself, he has missed the 
great end of human existence. There is an element 
in the constitution of man which demands recognition, 
and that element is what may be termed his soul- 
hunger. The crowning glory of man is his spiritual 
affinity with God. Among visible things he is the 
only creature who is capable of fellowship with God, 
and because of this majestic endowment he everywhere 
"feels after God if haply he may find Him." It is in 
this fact that religion roots itself, and the thwarting 
of this magnificent capacity is the secret of the larger 
part of the unrest and misery which we note in the 
human world. 

Man is but emptiness for God to fill — 
His soul a cavern for that boundless sea. 

This is clearly apparent from the fact that only in 
God can the human spirit find its true and sufficing 
rest — its assured and abiding satisfaction. Leave 
man without God, and, "wearied in the greatness of 
his way," he exhausts every species of disappoint- 
ment, and nowhere finds contentment or repose. The 
boundless and insatiable character of his desires is 
the mark and proof of his high destiny. Man is 
not a mere animal, or he would eat and drink, and 



78 LIFE'S EVENTIDE 

be satisfied, like an animal. The ox in the lush 
valley, the eagle in its daring flight, the sea-bird, 
sailing between sky and ocean, the tiger "wildly, 
fiercely beautiful, bounding over brake and jungle" 
in unfettered freedom — all these are content, and if 
man were a beast only he would be content as they. 
But a divine destiny is upon him, and the whole 
world is too poor for his ambition and too limited 
for his desire. 

Shelter in God 

Three thousand years ago David, the soldier- 
prophet and the poet-king, in a time of distress, and 
danger, and calamity, urged the prayer to the God 
of his life and trust, "Hide me under the shadow 
of Thy wings." And the lapse of time and the 
progress of human knowledge, whether in the sphere 
of physical science, or elsewhere, have wrought no 
change which can render this prayer irrelevant or 
unmeaning. Still do our hearts cry out for the 
living God. Still is He nigh unto all them that 
call upon Him. And still, amid the fears which 
darken, and the woes which press, and the hunger 
which nothing else can still, do we wisely raise the 
touching litany, "Hide me under the shadow of Thy 
wings !" 

How pathetic and significant is this cry! It is 
the cry of human feebleness seeking divine succor. 



RELIGION AND EVENTIDE 79 

It is darkness climbing toward the light. It is 
twilight sighing for the morning. It is ignorance 
urging its appeal to wisdom. It is insufficiency 
bringing its empty vase to the overflowing and 
exhaustless fountain. It is the cry of that deep 
soul-hunger which nothing but God can still. The 
wisdom of this cry is manifest, for there is no satis- 
faction so true as that which we experience when 
we find shelter under the wings of God. There 
is warmth under the shadow of these wings. The 
love of motherhood is kindled here, and angel and 
archangel and cherubim and seraphim are but as so 
many sparks flung off from this central fire. There 
is nearness under the shadow of these wings. Our 
succor is nigh at hand and not afar off. Here 
the soul's faintest whisper may be heard, and the 
slightest movement may link us with the power 
which governs all things. There is an abiding refuge 
under the shadow of these wings. Our human loved 
ones go forth from us, and we see them no more, 
neither can we hear their voices across the valley of 
death. Powerless and cold is the strong hand of our 
father which upheld us in infancy and youth, and the 
dear warm fingers of our mother are folded under the 
coffin lid. But our refuge in God never fails us. It 
is as surely ours in faltering age as in buoyant youth. 
Neither can death chill or remove it from us, for it is 
everlasting. 



80 LIFE'S EVENTIDE 

Deeply significant are the words which, in his old 
age, Michael Angelo uttered to the Father of his spirit 
and the God of his trust, "Thou gavest to time my 
soul, which is divine. Thou didst imprison it in this 
frail and weary garment. Thou didst nourish, sustain, 
and revive it. Without Thee, O Lord, it lacks every 
good. Thy power and love are its only safety." How 
impressive is this utterance in relation to those in 
declining years ! It is then that we feel our need of 
"everlasting strength." 

When there is sunshine on the path, and the blood 
is warm, and the heart is glad, and hope sings her 
pleasant song, and life is all before us with its golden 
promise, there is every temptation to dispense with 
trust and to feel sufficient in ourselves for all which 
circumstances may bring, or fate impose. But when 
the shadows fall, and friends depart, and the world 
recedes, and age makes havoc of our strength, and 
earthly desire fails, if we know anything of God at 
all we naturally seek refuge and shelter near the heart 
of the great Father and Mother of us all. 
" That is a beautiful parable of Dr. Pulsford's 
which reads: "In a recent summer I was on the 
top of a hill; it was evening. The lambs had 
wandered down into the valley. The mothers had 
remained on the hill. The lambs were now bleating 
in the valley. They did not bleat as they went 
down. They . gamboled and frolicked, and thought 



RELIGION AND EVENTIDE 81 

only of pleasure. But when the shades came on, and 
they began to feel lonely, and to be in want, they lifted 
up their voice. How suggestive is this, I said. Our 
cry can go where we are not. The cry of the lambs 
ascended to the hilltop, and I heard it there; but I 
saw not the lambs, I only heard their cry. The 
mothers on the hill! the lambs in the deep valley! 
and their cry coming up ! Listening I also looked, 
and saw that the cry went through the mothers; for, 
as I stood watching them, they set off, descending 
into the valley, where their lambs were. Thus I 
received instruction concerning the power of the 
great mother-heart of the universe. The children of 
God may wander from Him in their folly and in their 
play, but the need of God still dwells within them; 
and when, as the shadows of life's evening gather, 
they feel their loneliness, their danger, and their deep 
soul-hunger, He to whom they cry is not far off. 
Their appeal for love and for succor goes through 
Him, and they are again folded tenderly in the arms 
which never grow weary, and warmed and fed near 
the heart whch all their wandering and ingratitude 
could not chill." x 

The profoundest need of our being is our need 
of God. We are feeble, and need to lean upon His 
strength; we are lonely, and need the great com- 
panionship; we die, and need the shelter of the 
everlasting arms. 
6 



82 LIFE'S EVENTIDE 

How true are those lines of Wordsworth : 

One adequate support 
For the calamities of mortal life 
Exists — one only; an assured belief 
That the procession of our fate, howe'er 
Sad or disturbed, is ordered by a Being 
Of infinite benevolence and power; 
Whose everlasting purposes embrace 
All accidents, converting them to good. 

When men fail and droop and despair, in adversity 
or in old age, it is simply because they do not trust 
in God. But if, on the other hand, they yield them- 
selves to Him, relying on His love, casting themselves 
unreservedly upon it, certain that in suffering, or mis- 
fortune, or decay, He is "the same dear God of love 
and light" who never will or can forsake the humblest 
soul which trusts in Him, then they are strong and 
cannot be dismayed. In his Margaret Ogilvy, J. M. 
Barrie tells us that his aged mother's favorite para- 
phrase was — 

Art thou afraid His power shall fail 

When comes the evil day? 
And can the all-creating arm 

Grow weary or decay? 

Beautiful is the trust of old age in Him to whom 
the Lord Christ taught us to say when we pray 
"Our Father." This invocation teaches that we are 
not merely precious to God as units in the great 
interdependent mass of humanity, but individually 



RELIGION AND EVENTIDE 83 

precious as a child is precious to a father; that 
the activity, the thoughtfulness, the constant care of 
a father for his children have their counterpart in 
the divine Fatherhood, only in a fuller, grander 
measure, as God is greater, wiser, and more loving 
than we. He worketh hitherto and always for our 
welfare. His omnipotence is servant to His love, 
and His wisdom ministrant to His tenderness. He 
every day takes and replaces; makes voids and fills 
them; frustrates our plans and substitutes His own; 
causes circumstances and events seemingly adverse 
to work together for our good; that He may bring 
us in safety to "the inheritance of the saints in 
light." The feeble reason of the child of Providence 
may at times be overpowered by the vastness of 
the system amid which he lives; but his faith will 
smile upon his fear. He will think great things 
of God's goodness. He will refuse to doubt His 
fidelity, or to demur to His decrees. He will move 
through the twilight shadows with the song of 
Whittier on his lips : 

The mystery of the untried days, 

I close my eyes from reading; 
His will be done whose darkest ways 

To life and light are leading. 

The soul that confides in God can endure hard- 
ness, can suffer and be strong. Some years ago, 



84 LIFE'S EVENTIDE 

after conducting divine service in a Lancashire village, 
I was commissioned to take from the church financial 
help to an old weaver, a member of the church, who 
was a widower, childless and alone. He was one of 
the few who at that time worked at a loom in their 
own cottages. As the result of a long illness, poverty 
had entered his home and he was in deep distress. 
Knocking at the door and receiving no answer, I lifted 
the latch and entered the lowly dwelling. I paused 
on the threshold, for there by his loom the old weaver 
was kneeling in the twilight praying audibly. The 
words I heard were these : "O God, Thou art my God, 
my Father, my everlasting Friend. I am rich in 
Thee ! I am happy in Thee ! I am content in Thee !" 
I was the minister of that poor weaver, but I felt 
inclined to kneel down on the clay floor before him 
and ask his blessing. How sublime his consolations! 
Alone, yet not alone, because the Father was with 
him. Poor, and yet rich beyond the dreams of 
avarice. 

They are never unfriended or desolate who have 
God for Friend — the God who is always with us, who 
never changes, who can supply all our needs, who is 
our God for ever and ever, and who "will be our guide 
even unto death." 

"A noble guest is within the Christian," wrote 
Archbishop Leighton, "and his chief business is to 
entertain Him, and lead a celestial life." 



RELIGION AND EVENTIDE 85 

Immortal Hope 

Yet further, this experience of fellowship with God, 
and trust in Him, bears with it the assurance of im- 
mortality. 'This is life eternal," says the inspired 
Word, "to know Thee the only true God, and Jesus 
Christ whom Thou hast sent." The hopes and aspira- 
tions of religion transcend temporal conditions and 
reach forth into eternity. They are based on a spir- 
itual fellowship begun in this world and continuable 
in the next. 

Its lore detects beneath our crumbling clay 
A soul, exiled, and journeying back to day. 

Living in time, the devout believer yet knows 
himself to be living in the eternal life. He is 
assured that God will not forsake His own life 
which he has quickened in his soul, but will sustain 
and cherish it for ever. The idea of the Divine 
Fatherhood would suiter shipwreck if such a prayer 
were unheeded as that of St. Augustine, "O my 
God, Thy Word declares that no man can see Thy 
face and live. Then let me die that I may see Thy 
face." The saintly life would be a mockery if there 
were no response to Charles Wesley's expectation 
uttered with his dying breath, "I shall be satisfied 
when I awake in Thy likeness — satisfied — satisfied!" 
Longings and anticipations such as these kindled 
in saintly souls are prophecies of a nobler future. 



86 LIFE'S EVENTIDE 

They are the preludings of a majestic destiny. Such 
spirits, despite the ravages of decay, exclaim to the 
Father of spirits and the God of truth, "Thou wilt 
show me the path of life. In Thy presence there 
is fullness of joy, and at Thy right hand there are 
pleasures for evermore." To refer again to the words 
of the catechism quoted by Carlyle, those who 
glorify God "enjoy Him for ever." This is no hope 
kindled by fanaticism, but founded on natural 
capacity and desire. 

Goethe says: "However much man is attracted to 
the earth with its thousands and thousands of interests, 
he still lifts up his eyes with longing to the sky, the 
vault of which rises above him in immeasurable space, 
for he feels deeply and distinctly within him that he is 
a citizen of that spiritual realm, the belief in which he 
can neither decline nor abandon." 

Browning writes in his Pauline : 



I cannot chain my soul: it will not rest 
In its clay prison, this most narrow sphere: 
It has strange impulse, tendency, desire, 
Which nowise I account for nor explain, 
But cannot stifle, being bound to trust 
All feelings equally, to hear all sides: 
How can my life indulge them? yet they live, 
Referring to some state of life unknown. 



. 



True Reality," says Lotze on the last page of 
the Microcosmos, "is not matter, and is still less Idea, 



RELIGION AND EVENTIDE 87 

but is the living Personal Spirit of God and the world 
of personal spirits which He has created." This great 
sentence, from one of the greatest of all thinkers, set- 
tles, for some of us, the question of man's immortality. 
The personal spirit of man, like the Personal Spirit 
of God, represents Reality, and thus cannot perish 
with the body, because it is not of the body, and can- 
not be affected by time, because it is born from eternity, 
and has nothing to do with time, except in so far as it 
is imprisoned for awhile in a time garment for educa- 
tion and for discipline. 

Lamartine said : "Bounded in his nature, but infinite 
in his desires, man is a fallen god who has a recollec- 
tion of heaven/' This reminds us of Wordsworth's 
beautiful conception, derived from Plato, in which 
he pictures the soul as coming from God, the great 
sea of being ; traversing the earth as a peninsula ; and 
then, its journey ended, reaching the sea again at life's 
close. During its earthly experience the divine light 
which it brings from heaven is gradually dimmed, 
and the divine voices melt away. But the memory 
of "the imperial palace whence it came" is never 
wholly lost. In seasons of calm weather it recollects 
the sea which brought it to the coast, on whose 
shores the children are still playing; and in old age, 
having traversed the peninsula of time, it returns to 
the sea again, or, in other words, goes back to God. 
It becomes an angel of eternity, folded in the 



88 LIFE'S EVENTIDE 

rest of heaven, and in the smile of God for ever- 
more. 

However this may be, the soul which confides in 
God regards death, not as the end of life, but only 
as the portal to a fuller and grander life. Vital 
religion includes within it an immortal destiny, 
for the soul which participates in the life of God. 
cannot die. Life in God is immortality begun. A 
living faith in God's providence inspires immortal 
hope. Life is a school, and the divine Teacher does 
not educate His pupils for the grave. Life is a 
discipline, and trial, and sorrow, and bereavement are 
permitted for some definite and worthy end. As 
Arthur Clough says: 

We must believe. For still we hope 
That in a world of larger scope 
What here is faithfully begun 
Will be completed, not undone. 

It is this conviction through which, in all ages, 
devout men have triumphed over death. Plotinus, 
one of the nobler heathen, exclaimed, when dying: 
"I am struggling to liberate the divinity within me." 
On the monumental tablet of Thales the Greeks 
inscribed the epitaph: "He was removed on high 
because his eyes, dimmed by age, could no longer 
from afar behold the stars." "How shall we bury 
you?" said Crito to Socrates, before he drank the 
poison. "Just as you please," replied Socrates, "if 



RELIGION AXD EVENTIDE 89 

you can only catch me." The wise man of Athens 
knew that his spirit could not die. 

Passing from heathen hope to Christian faith, ex- 
pectation rises into certainty. "We know," said St. 
Paul, "that if this earthly house of our tabernacle 
be dissolved, we have a building from God, a house 
not made with hands, eternal in the heavens." 
From Dante we have the grand confession: "Thus 
I believe, thus I affirm, thus I am certain it is; and 
that from this life I shall pass to another and a 
better, where that Lady lives, of whom my soul was 
enamored." Shakespeare, in his last will and testa- 
ment, wrote : "I commend my soul into the hands 
of God my Creator, hoping and assuredly believing, 
through the only merits of Jesus Christ my Saviour, 
to be made partaker of life everlasting." That wild 
Western man of genius, Walt Whitman, wrote : "Did 
you think life was so well provided for, and Death, 
the purport of all life, is not well provided for?" 
"Surely, surely," wrote Thomas Carlyle, "there is a 
life beyond death, and that gloomy portal leads to a 
purer and an abiding mansion." Tennyson declared 
that to him "annihilation was impossible and incon- 
ceivable," and what is his In Memoriam but a hymn 
to that diviner future, where — 

Wrapped from the fickle and the frail, 
With gathered powers, yet the same, 
We pierce the keen seraphic flame 

From orb to orb, from veil to veil? 



90 LIFE'S EVENTIDE 

Said William Blake, at the death of Flaxman: "I 
cannot think of death as more than the going out 
of one room into another." 

Thus do the souls, whose trust is in the living God, 
speak of the phantom which men call death, and they 
do this because they are conscious of a life which 
transcends and survives all physical decay. 

The pledge of their immortality is given in the 
spiritual life now pulsing within them — that life of 
faith, and hope, and sublime thirst after perfection 
with which the decay of the body has nothing at all 
to do. They step westward toward the sunset with 
hearts serene and strong, assured that God will not 
forsake His own elect, but, having guided them by 
His counsel, will finally "receive them to glory." 

Thus assured, as the twilight shadows gather on 
their path, and the earthly house of their tabernacle 
weakens and gives way, they urge the pathetic 
prayer of Oliver Wendell Holmes: 

O Father ! grant Thy love divine 
To make these mystic temples Thine ! 
When wasting age and wearying strife 
Have sapped the leaning walls of life, 
When darkness gathers over all, 
And the last tottering pillars fall, 
Take the poor dust Thy mercy warms, 
And mold it into heavenly forms. 



VI. DUTIES OP AGE 

i. DUTIES TOWARD GOD 

From Thee is all that soothes the life of man, 
His high endeavor, and his glad success, 
His strength to suffer, and his will to serve. 
But oh, Thou bounteous Giver of all good! 
Thou art of all Thy gifts Thyself the crown! 
Give what Thou canst, without Thee we are poor; 
And with Thee rich, take what Thou wilt away. 

COWPER. 

Too late I loved Thee, O Thou beauty of ancient days, yet 
ever new. Too late I loved Thee, O Thou sweetness never 
failing — Thou blissful and assured sweetness. 

St. Augustine. 

EVERY stage of human life has its duties, from 
which we cannot with impunity break away. 
Duty is the pole-star of wandering and perplexed 
humanity: an unchanging mark by which we need 
to steer. Its sacredness demands from us an adequate 
response, lest we should be guilty of the baseness and 
incur the peril of being outcasts from its realm. It 
is the deep, clear heaven into which the skylark of 
happiness goes singing. 

Now, there are duties which belong to declining 
years, duties toward God and toward our fellow men, 

91 



92 LIFE'S EVENTIDE 

whose voice we are bound to acknowledge and 
to obey. 

Our duty toward God may be summed up in 
the obligations of thankfulness and praise, and of 
free-hearted consecration to His service. The duty 
of praise to God for all the blessings of our life is 
almost universally admitted. But, alas! the knowl- 
edge of a duty and its performance are two different 
things. In the valley of sorrow and distress many 
altars are built from which to supplicate the mercy 
of God, but on the mount of success and happiness 
few altars are raised for the sacrifice of thanksgiving 
and of gratitude. The reason is that our interests 
drive us to prayer, and love only to thanks. Yet 
praise is nobler than prayer. Prayer is the language 
of earth, praise is the language of heaven. Prayer 
is the cry of an imprisoned spirit issuing through 
the dungeon bars of time, praise is the voice of 
an emancipated spirit ringing through the deeps of 
eternity. We all feel that there is nothing so odious 
as ingratitude. Men have crushed this conviction 
into the couplet: 

He that's ungrateful hath no crimes but one, 
All other virtues pass for vices in him. 

Nevertheless, ingratitude is continually the portion 
of God. It is the old story of the ten lepers who 
were cleansed. Only one returns to bless the Healer, 



DUTIES OF AGE 93 

and the mournful question issues from His lips, 
"Where are the nine?" 

There is a beautiful legend to the effect that when 
God had finished the work of creation He asked of an 
angel contemplating His work what else was needed 
to make it perfect. The reply was, "Nothing, O 
beneficent Creator, but that a mighty voice should 
continually be heard speaking Thy praise." 

As far as our world is concerned, that voice should 
be the voice of man, the epitome and crown of things. 
Herbert, the poet of the Temple, writes : 

Man is the World's high priest ! He doth present 

The Sacrifice for all ; while they below 
Unto the service mutter an assent, 

Such as springs use that fall, and winds that blow ! 
He that to praise and laud Thee doth refrain, 

Doth not refrain unto himself alone, 
But robs a thousand who would praise Thee fain, 

And doth commit a world of sin in one. 

Causes for Thankfulness 

No man can look back upon a long life without 
finding numberless incentives to gratitude and praise. 
The very gift of life, with the power of making 
it something beautiful and fruitful, is in itself an 
unspeakable boon. To breathe, to think, to love, to 
labor, to serve, to commune with the Deity as a 
prelude to an everlasting fellowship — how great is 
the privilege included in these things! These are 



94 LIFE'S EVENTIDE 

possibilities which might well cause the morning 
stars to sing together, and the sons of God to shout 
for joy, when man first appeared on the earth, and 
received that breath — that effluence of the Deity — 
which constituted him "a living soul." When, with 
such possibilities in their possession, men speak 
of life as not worth living, they scarcely appear 
to have emerged from the condition of the ape or 
the tiger. 

Then have followed the numberless mercies which 
should make our life a continuous psalm of praise. 
Sight and hearing; food and clothing; night and 
gentle sleep; health and strength for every needful 
purpose; the charm of Nature, with her vales and 
hills, her moving clouds and sounding waters; the 
blessing of an early environment favorable to virtue; 
the sanctities of home; the friends of buoyant youth; 
the guides of ripening manhood; the deep, sweet 
passion of requited love; the call to honest and in- 
vigorating toil; the delight of battle with our peers; 
the glow of victory and the reward of patient toil; 
golden opinions from elect souls silencing the sneers 
of the envious ; the noble inspiration of the inspired 
artist; the calm satisfaction of the intellect dwelling 
on worthy themes; the deep peace of the conscience 
in the choice of right; the joy of the trusting soul 
dwelling under the shadow of the Almighty; the 
exuberant bounty which has not only filled our cup 



DUTIES OF AGE 95 

with -blessing, but caused it to overflow, — all these 
are causes for profound thankfulness. Indeed, when 
we think first of the gift, then of the Giver, and then 
of the tender and thoughtful love which prompted 
the gift, we question if all the uplifted voices of 
mankind could render an adequate meed of praise for 
a snowdrop breathing through the pearly drift like the 
last sigh of departing winter, or a daffodil raising its 
golden trumpet as herald of the Spring. 

Consider also, if the gates of the soul have been 
kept open, how many visitations from the living God 
have been granted for our uplifting. We have been 
inwardly visited and strengthened by "a power not 
ourselves," which has made for peace and sanctity: 
a power divinely given — 

To conquer love of self and lust of life, 
To tear deep-rooted passion from the breast, 
To still the inward strife. 

We have been girded by the hand of another for 
higher issues than we ourselves have sought, and car- 
ried whither we would not, by winds and currents of 
no earthly birth. The heavenly voices which have 
rebuked our worldliness; the serious impressions and 
profound convictions which have poured contempt 
on many an ignoble purpose; the hopes which have 
empowered our feeble wills; the gleams of insight 
and touches of finer feeling which have shamed our 



9 6 LIFE'S EVENTIDE 

baseness ; the longings and aspirations which have 
lent us wings to rise above the dust; the warmth 
which has thawed the frost of habit and set the 
prisoned virtues free, — what were all these but 

gracious 

visitings, 
Of the Upholder of the tranquil soul, 
That tolerates the indignities of time, 
And, from the center of Eternity, 
All finite motions overruling lives 
In glory everlasting. 

And what of the Providence which has shaped the 
ends which we had hewn so roughly? What of the 
tender forbearance apart from which our wayward 
passion and turbulent self-will would have thwarted 
all its purposes of good? — the persistent loving-kind- 
ness which could not surrender us to ruin; the un- 
wearied patience which could wait until, sick of the 
swine-trough and the degradation, we turned our feet 
toward home; the indulgent pity which, armed with 
divine resources, rescued us from the consequences of 
our own folly, or it may be of our own sin; the in- 
breathed power which has lightened for us the burden 
of our fate ; the delicate minuteness of regard in which 
the very hairs of our head have all been numbered? 
"Whoso is wise, and will observe these things, shall 
understand the loving-kindness of the Lord." 

And what of pain and grief, disappointment and 
failure, sickness and bereavement — have these been 



DUTIES OF AGE 97 

without divine purpose? Nay, their frequency attests 
their necessity, and their issues amply justify the 
wisdom and beneficence of their permission! If 
strength and fortitude, meekness and patience, wisdom 
and sympathy be blessings, then our sorrowful ex- 
periences also give cause for thankfulness. The 
storm and hail from heaven may have shattered our 
flowers, but they have left jewels in their track. They 
also have been messengers fulfilling God's word, and 
have received a charge concerning us to bear us 
up in their hands lest we grow hard and superficial 
and indolent and proud. These are joys in life which 
we might have missed and been none the poorer, but 
no great sorrow has visited us which we could have 
escaped without loss. The stern rocks against which 
we have beaten in wild frenzy our puny hands, have 
proved the altar-stairs which have "sloped through 
darkness up to God." 

He has shattered our idols, that we might see His 
face. He has withered our gourds, that He Himself 
might be our shade. He has dried up our cisterns, 
that He might be our fountain. He has put lover 
and friend far from us, that we might feel underneath 
and around us the everlasting arms. 

Touch by touch and stroke by stroke, the Master 

Potter has molded the clay for His own use, and we 

shall applaud His purpose when the cup is lifted 

to His lips at the great Marriage Supper of the 

7 



p8 LIFE'S EVENTIDE 

Lamb. How finely Browning has handled this 
theme! Seizing the ancient metaphor of the Potter's 
Wheel, he shows how from youth to age the cup is 
being shaped and graven, how our present life is 
a divine discipline, and how in the life hereafter 
the chalice shall be consecrated for the Master's 
use. 

Ay, note that Potter's wheel, 

That metaphor! and feel 
Why time spins fast, why passive lies our Clay, — 

Thou, to whom fools propound, 

When the wine makes its round, 
"Since life fleets, all is change; the Past gone, seize 
today!" 

Fool ! All that is, at all, 

Lasts ever, past recall; 
Earth changes, but thy soul and God stand sure: 

What entered into thee, 

That was, is, and shall be: 
Time's wheel runs back or stops: Potter and clay endure. 

Look not thou down, but up! 

To uses of a cup, 
The festal board, lamp's flash and trumpet's peal, 

The new wine's foaming flow, 

The Master's lips a-glow ! 
Thou, heaven's consummate cup, what need'st thou with 
earth's wheel? 

So, take and use Thy work: 

Amend what flaws may lurk, 
What strain o' the stuff, what warpings past the aim ! 

My times be in Thy hand! 

Perfect the cup as planned! 
Let age approve of youth, and death complete the same! 



DUTIES OF AGE 99 

The Duty of Consecration 

That is a profound saying of Matthew Arnold's 
that "on reflection we are not conscious that we 
deserve anything." Yet, apart from our deserving, 
all these blessings have been showered upon us. 
Nothing which we possess is really from ourselves. 
If we have had health, it is the gift of God; intel- 
lect, it is the gift of God; resolve and resource, they 
are the gift of God. "How idle," says Julius Hare, 
"it is to call certain things godsends ! as if there were 
anything else in this world." Recognizing this, how 
then can we escape the duty urged upon us by the 
greatest of the Apostles, "I beseech you therefore, 
brethren, by the mercies of God, that ye present 
your bodies a living sacrifice, holy, acceptable unto 
God, which is your reasonable service?" It is the 
glad recognition of God's loving providence in our 
life which constitutes the essence of religion. Chris- 
tian devotion consists in the prevailing sense that we 
are creatures momently dependent on God, creatures 
"standing before the eye and living in the hands of 
our everlasting Creator." 

The essence of impiety is implied in the divine 
impeachment of ancient Israel — "She did not know 
that I gave her corn, and wine, and oil, and multi- 
plied her silver and her gold, which they prepared for 
Baal." This forgetfulness of God and prostitution of 



ioo LIFE'S EVENTIDE 

His gifts to base uses is the primal sin of the world 
to-day. Men share His bounty, breathe His air, live 
by His permission, succeed through His strength, yet 
never bestow on Him a single thought. They act 
as if the God who made the heavens were an 
intruder in His own creation, and His claims an 
invasion of their liberties and a bar to their 
happiness. 

Thus acting, they break away from their center, as 
a planet from its central sun, and fling themselves 
out into darkness and cold. Furthermore, having lost 
their center, every relation of their life is involved in 
proportionate discord. They whirl away madly from 
their orbit and clash with other worlds which cross 
their path. They are restless and unhappy in them- 
selves and at war with others. They have made self 
the center of life instead of God, and are hungry and 
desolate, the prey of lust and vanity and cursed by 
unsatisfied desire. This fact did not escape the search- 
ing glance of Plato. He says, "In truth, the principle 
of excessive self-love is the cause of all the sins into 
which man continually falls." 

It is this indifference to the claims of God which 
makes what we call conversion necessary, and which 
largely explains its meaning. Great as may be 
the moral distinction between individuals, this one 
thing is common to the race — our life's center is 
not in God, but in ourselves and in the good things 



DUTIES OF AGE 101 

of this world. To be converted is to be turned from 
self and the world to God; it is to transfer our life's 
center of gravity from ourselves to God, who is the 
first cause and ultimate aim of our being. The 
supreme wisdom of life consists in a glad return to 
God and a loving consecration to His service. Thus 
we return to our center, and bloom, and shine, and 
sing like a planet in its appointed orbit. It is our 
highest privilege, therefore, as it is our foremost 
duty, to press through our environment, to force 
our spirits through the jungle of our manifold activi- 
ties, that we may stand face to face with God, who, 
on His part, is for ever pushing aside the veil which 
conceals Him, and seeking to be known and loved by 
us. Every breath we draw; every gleam of beauty 
which attracts and charms us, either in the pageant 
of Nature or the human world; every pulse of 
power by which we prevail and triumph; every 
tender affection which makes earth home for us; 
every secret inspiration which invests us with finer 
being; every lofty hope which spurns our clay and 
links us with the immortals; every pure desire which 
attunes our nature to the heavenlies, — all is of God 
and calls for a glad and responsive consecration to 
the Father of our spirits and the God of all grace. 
If, conscious of all we owe to Him, we withhold our 
homage and devotion, the stone of the field may 
well cry out against us, the ox which knoweth his 



102 LIFE'S EVENTIDE 

owner and the ass his master's crib rebuke our 
insensibility, angels blush for our ingratitude, and 
our sainted dead turn from us with a sigh of dis- 
appointment and regret. 

But, on the other hand, what a joy it is to be found 
in God, to belong to Him, to lean our whole weight 
on Him, to roll the burden of our destiny on Him, 
to lie in His hand and feel the breath of His love 
upon us for evermore ! 

This is the heart of true religion, the inward con- 
sciousness of sonship resting in God's Fatherland and 
delighting in a glad surrender of all we have and are 
to Him, an experience never so precious as when the 
twilight shadows fall upon our path. This is conse- 
cration, and this also is true blessedness. 

2. DUTIES TOWARD OUR FELLOW MEN 

What asks our Father of His children, save 
Justice, and Mercy, and Humility, 
A reasonable service of good deeds, 
Pure living, tenderness to human needs, 
Reverence and trust and prayer for light to see 
The Master's footprints in our daily ways? 

Whittier. 

The world passes away and we are passing with it; but 
there is doubtless another world, which will endure for ever. 
In the meantime let us be kind to one another. 

Dr. Johnson. 

We have dealt with the duty of love to God 
and of consecration to His service. In the words of 



DUTIES OF AGE 103 

the Great Teacher, this duty is inseparably linked 
with love and service for man. The first command- 
ment is that we should love the Lord our God with 
all our heart and soul and strength. "And the 
second is like, namely this, Thou shalt love thy 
neighbor as thyself." Service for man springs 
naturally from consecration to God. The likeness 
of God, dim and stained, it may be, but still in- 
destructible, shines in the spiritual nature of man, 
and our love for God must extend to all who bear 
His image and are capable of enjoying Him for ever. 
Piety toward God does not absolve us from our duty 
toward our fellow men. On the contrary, it invests 
that duty with diviner sanctions. The apostle of 
love is very urgent on this question. He says, in 
words which have more in them of the "eagle's 
bark at blood" than of the dove, "If any man say, 
I love God, and hateth his brother, he is a liar: for 
he that loveth not his brother whom he hath seen, 
how can he love God whom he hath not seen?" 
The late Professor Tyndall, in a very interesting 
paper published soon after the death of Carlyle, 
gives a pathetic picture of his final visit to the 
Scottish sage. He relates that the old man was so 
weak that his visitor had to prop his drooping head 
against his breast. He then asked Carlyle if he 
would give him some word of advice for the conduct 
of life. Carlyle answered, "Give yourself royally." 



104 LIFE'S EVENTIDE 

It was a fragment of splendid counsel. It is 
not, indeed, too much to say that it includes every 
essential element of nobleness. They are truly great 
who serve, and who, in serving, give themselves. A 
lady once said to William Wilberforce, "I fear you 
are so busy about those slaves that you are neglecting 
your own soul." "True, madam," he replied; "I 
had quite forgotten that I had one." What can be 
conceived more splendid than those words inscribed 
on the tomb of General Gordon in St. Paul's 
Cathedral? "A man who at all times and every- 
where gave his strength to the weak, his substance 
to the poor, his sympathy to the suffering, and his 
heart to God." 



Active Kindness 
Our duty toward our fellows is that of kindness, 
and, as far as it lies in our power, of active kindness. 
Benjamin Franklin, the most practical of Americans, 
says, "The noblest question in the world is, What 
good may I do in it?" It may reasonably be urged 
that much in the way of beneficent activity cannot 
be expected from those in declining years. 



But, age is opportunity no less 
Than youth itself, though in another dress; 
And as the evening twilight fades away, 
The sky is filled with stars invisible by day. 



DUTIES OF AGE 105 

Thought and reflection reveal duties which ardent 
youth does not pause to consider, and the world 
has need of the whole-hearted service of the oldest 
and the feeblest among us. Our time is short, there- 
fore let us make haste to be kind. Let us gather 
up the fragments of opportunity, that nothing be 
lost. With us the case is urgent, for our day is 
well nigh spent, and the "night cometh when no 
man can work." If we have anything to do for Christ 
and His Church, anything to do for our children, 
anything to do for the neglected children of others, 
anything to do for those in our employment, any- 
thing to do for our neighbors, anything to do for the 
poor, the workless, the outcast, the desolate and the 
fallen, we must do it quickly, for "the night cometh 
when no man can work." It behooves us to remem- 
ber that if we neglect our present opportunities of 
blessing and helping men, they will never return to 
us again. Doubtless in heaven there will be "such 
high offices as suit its nobler energies," but there will 
be no starving children to be fed, no orphans to be 
sheltered, no sick to be healed, no perishing souls 
to be saved. Ministries are possible to us now 
which will then be no longer possible, and the pres- 
ent neglect of which will bring dimness on the 
crowns we wear, tinge our bright thoughts with 
shadows of regret, and mingle notes of sadness with 
our songs. 



106 LIFE'S EVENTIDE 

Though we may be able to do but little, that little 
has its value. As Wordsworth says: 

Small service is true service while it lasts: 
The daisy, by the shadow that it casts, 
Protects the lingering dewdrop from the sun. 

Father Bonhours remarks in his dialogues that the 
Graces were always represented of small stature, in 
order to show that their virtue consisted in little 
things, in a gesture, a smile, an accent of kindness, 
or a respectful air. So there may be a gentleness 
in service on the part of the aged which makes it 
winsome if not great. 

The longer we live, and the more we reflect, the 
more we are disposed to regard kindness and help- 
fulness toward others as the great virtue as regards 
this world, and the opposite as the great vice. 
Essential evil is powerfully personified in Goethe's 
devil, whose chief characteristic is malignant hate, 
and the lust to injure and to blast; while Milton's 
Satan touches the last abyss of infamy in the dark 
confession : 

Save what is in destroying, other joy 
To me is lost. 

Both the Old Testament and the New insist on 
this outgoing of kindness as the primal virtue, as far 
as this world is concerned. We find it in Job's 
vindication of himself against the slander of his 



DUTIES OF AGE 107 

enemies. "I delivered the poor that cried, and the 
fatherless, and him that had none to help him. The 
blessing of him that was ready to perish came upon 
me, and I caused the widow's heart to sing for 
joy. ..." What scorn, again, of hurtful and in- 
jurious wrong-doing throbs in the indictment by the 
prophet Jeremiah against Jehoiakim, the son of Josiah, 
king of Judah! He has builded "his house by un- 
righteousness and his chambers by wrong." He has 
used "his neighbor's service without wages and given 
him not for his work." He has "given his eyes and 
his heart to covetousness and to shed innocent blood, 
and for oppression and for violence to do it. There- 
fore, thus saith the Lord concerning Jehoiakim, the 
son of Josiah, king of Judah: They shall not lament 
for him saying, Ah, my brother! . . . He shall be 
buried with the burial of an ass, drawn and cast forth 
beyond the gates of Jerusalem." The whole life of 
our Divine Redeemer was but a sublime comment 
on the words read by Him in the synagogue of 
the Jews: "The Spirit of the Lord is upon Me, 
because He hath anointed Me to preach the gospel 
to the poor; He hath sent Me to heal the broken- 
hearted, to preach deliverance to the captives, and 
recovering of sight to the blind." Note also the 
definition of pure religion given by the Apostle 
James: "Pure religion and undefiled before God and 
the Father is this, to visit the fatherless and widows 



io8 LIFE'S EVENTIDE 

in their affliction, and to keep himself unspotted 
from the world." 

God marks how long this human life shall be. 
How grandly broad with reach of sympathy — 
How high toward heaven its growth — He leaves to thee! 

How We May Serve Men 

If it be asked how, though in declining years, we 
may serve our fellow men, we reply we may serve 
by sympathy, by charity, and by wise counsel. 

It is not easy to overestimate the value of sympathy 
in life, that sympathy which is to tired and suffering 
hearts as the rain to the mown grass. And how great 
is the call for sympathy in the human world! Hun- 
dreds of men make the journey of life with bleeding 
feet. "Tired of living," were the words found on a 
card in the room of a millionaire who had sought 
refuge from his miseries in suicide. The young are 
with us, just stepping out into the battle; the poor, 
struggling with adverse fortune; the sensitive, shrink- 
ing from observation; the crushed and hopeless, won- 
dering if death will bring them any surcease of sorrow ; 
the doubting, stunned and bewildered as the old beliefs 
slip from their trembling hands; the baffled and per- 
plexed, over whom God's providence rests as a dark 
cloud; the tempted, craving for help in danger; the 
fallen and degraded, needing some kindly arm to lift 
them from the mire. 



DUTIES OF AGE 109 

What nobler office can we covet than that of bring- 
ing comfort and refreshment to such as these? Let 
us get heart to heart with such baffled, weary, suffer- 
ing souls. Let us show that though the body may 
grow old the heart may still be young. Let us succor 
the afflicted and uplift the careworn. "Let us be to 
them," as one has said, "divine men and women. Let 
their timid aspirations find in us a friend. Let their 
trampled instincts be genially tempted out into our 
atmosphere. Let their doubts know that we have 
doubted, let their sorrow know that we have wept. 
Let us perform for them the Christ-like office, and 
present or absent we shall be followed by their love 
as by an angel." 



The Grace of Charity 

Another way in which we may serve men is by 
the winsome grace of charity : the charity of which 
the apostle writes, which "sufrereth long and is kind," 
which "envieth not," which "seeketh not her own," 
which "is not easily provoked," which "thinketh no 
evil," which "rejoiceth not in iniquity, but rejoiceth 
in the truth"; which "beareth all things, believeth all 
things, hopeth all things, endureth all things." There 
is not a single feature in this catalogue of virtues 
which is not applicable to age, or which would fail to 
constitute its white hairs "a crown of glory." Charity 



no LIFE'S EVENTIDE 

means a kind and reverent handling of men and of 
their actions, an allowance for their frailties and 
temptations, an honest anxiety for their welfare, 
and an unquenchable belief that, however far they 
have drifted from the right, they are still capable 
of uplifting and restoration. And, unless we are 
blinded by an egregious vanity, is not the record of 
our own experience an antidote to censoriousness ? 
If not, we have coasted only in the shallows of life 
and never dared the sea; the tempest has not smitten 
us in its fury, or the wild waters hissed beneath our 
keel. There is a man in all of us whom we despise, 
and over whom we have to keep continual guard. It 
is often hard work to be patient with ourselves ; why, 
then, should we be severe toward others? Many an 
abyss into which others have fallen might have been 
ours but for some holy memory, some tender inter- 
cession, or some outstretched hand. 

An important branch of charity consists in kind 
judgments. No man can justly censure or condemn 
his fellow, because no man truly knows another. 
We only hear separate words or see separate actions 
while the springs of motive are sealed and hidden. 
And, where opportunity for exact knowledge is 
lacking, it is better to err on the side of charity than 
on that of harshness. Kind judgments are friendly 
to virtue, for many a man has been kept noble 
through being considered noble, while others who 



DUTIES OF AGE in 

have been branded as base have lost heart and 
stooped to baseness. Furthermore, as a matter of 
experience, we have found that our generous judg- 
ments have proved more correct than those which 
were ungenerous. The lines of A. A. Procter are 
worth pondering: 

Judge not the workings of his brain, 

Or of his heart thou canst not see ; 
What looks to thy dim eyes a stain, 

In God's pure light may only be 
A scar, brought from some well-won field, 
Where thou wouldst only faint and yield. 

It would be well if all would emulate the beautiful 
spirit of John Wesley, thus expressed: "Is any evil 
related of any man? Love hopes that the relation 
is not true, that the thing related was never done. Is 
it certain it was? Then, perhaps, not with such 
circumstances as are related. Was the action ap- 
parently undeniably evil? Love hopes the intention 
was not so. And even when it cannot be doubted 
but that all the action, design, and temper were 
equally evil, still love hopes that God will at last 
lay bare His arm, and get Himself the victory, and 
that there will be joy in heaven over the sinner that 
repenteth." 

Forgiveness 

Another important branch of Christian charity is 
the forgiveness of injuries. Those are strong words 



ii2 LIFE'S EVENTIDE 

of the great Dr. Johnson, but in the light of Christ's 
teaching and Christ's example not too strong: "Of 
him that hopes to be forgiven, it is indispensably re- 
quired that he forgive. It is therefore superfluous 
to urge any other motive. On this great duty eternity 
is suspended; and to him that refuses to practice it, 
the throne of mercy is inaccessible, and the Saviour 
of the world has been born in vain." 

The virtue of forgiveness touched its highest point 
in that majestic litany of mercy breathed by Christ 
upon the cross, after three long hours of terrible 
agony, "Father, forgive them, for they know not what 
they do." It was fitting that from the same sacred 
lips there should be enforced on all men the prayer 
and the duty, "Forgive us our trespasses, as we for- 
give them that trespass against us." The condition 
of forgiveness is a forgiving spirit. To this petition 
only did our Lord append a commentary: "For if 
ye forgive not men their trespasses, neither will your 
Heavenly Father forgive your trespasses." It is too 
often forgotten that he who refuses to forgive asks 
not to be forgiven. The Paternoster binds us to 
extend to others the same divine pardon which we 
crave for ourselves. And why not forgive? Do not 
all say, "Our Father," and is it not a sadder thing to 
inflict an injury than to suffer an injury? Further- 
more, how often we have to say of those who have 
wronged us, "They know not what they do"! They 



DUTIES OF AGE 113 

were chafed and fretted in the battle of life. They 
were ignorant and envious, beaten and broken, stricken 
and depressed. Surely we can afford to let them pass ! 
How true is the saying, "To revenge is human, to 
forgive divine." Nor should it be forgotten that this 
duty of forgiveness, if obeyed, carries with it, like all 
other duties which we honor, its own sufficient reward. 
"When thou forgivest," says Richter, "the man who 
has pierced thy heart stands to thee in the relation of 
the sea-worm that perforates the shell of the oyster, 
which straightway closes the wound with a pearl." 
Besides, it should be easier to forgive at eventide, be- 
cause death, "the great conciliator," is moving toward 
us in the twilight, and all enmities are forgotten when 
the grass waves above the head of those who in word 
or deed have wronged us. This Whittier felt when 
he wrote the lines : 



My heart was heavy, for its trust had been 

Abused, its kindness answered with foul wrong; 

So, turning gloomily from my fellow men, 
One summer Sabbath day I strolled among 

The green mounds of the village burial-place; 
Where, pondering how all human love and hate 
Find one sad level; and how, soon or late, 

Wronged and wrong-doer, each with meekened face, 
And cold hands folded over a still heart, 

Pass the green threshold of our common grave, 
Whither all footsteps tend, whence none depart, 

Awed for myself, and pitying my race, 

Our common sorrow, like a mighty wave, 

Swept all my pride away, and trembling I forgave! 
8 



U4 LIFE'S EVENTIDE 



Wise Giving 



Another branch of charity which those in declining 
years should cultivate is that of wise giving. A 
quaint old thinker has said, "All vices wax old by 
age; covetousness alone groweth young." One of 
the special dangers of age is that of covetousness. 
This is specially the case where money has been 
hardly won and slowly gathered. Money means 
comfort, power, human respect ; and for these reasons 
it exercises over us a singular fascination. Neverthe- 
less, as God is the supreme Giver, a life of giving is 
the divine life. On the authority of the highest, we 
have it that "it is more blessed to give than to re- 
ceive." The poor we have always with us, there are 
many struggling churches in our midst, many noble 
institutions crippled for lack of funds; and after a 
man has made adequate provision for those who are 
dear to him, he should cultivate the grace of giving. 
A man has no pocket in his shroud, and he is only 
a niggard who, like a money-box made of earthen- 
ware, needs to be broken before he will yield anything. 
These are remarkable words of the Great Teacher 
where He refers to money as "the mammon of un- 
righteousness," and advises its possessor to make 
friends by its distribution, who shall receive him into 
everlasting habitations. This definition of money 
seems on the face of it stern and forbidding, but 



DUTIES OF AGE 115 

we shall recognize its wisdom if we remember the 
fact that our commerce is for the most part based 
on selfishness. The trail of the serpent is upon it, 
and it greatly needs to be sanctified by open-handed 
generosity. Money hoarded or merely spent on 
ourselves may prove a millstone about our neck, but 
spent on others it may lift us on wings as eagles. 

It is wise and fitting that the aged should be 
almoners of their own bounty. Why should they 
leave to others, who may manifest less wisdom in 
the task, the joy of giving? Why should not their 
own hearts receive the refreshment of the answering 
gratitude which is thrown up like healing dew from 
souls which have been cheered in hours of distress 
and necessity? 

Oh, the heart grows rich in giving, 

All its wealth is living grain ; 
Seed which mildews in the garner, 

Scattered, fills with gold the plain. 

Wise Counsel 

Another service which age can render is that of 
wise counsel based on experience. We owe to those 
around us instruction in wisdom, guidance as to the 
safe path in life, and warning concerning its pitfalls. 
Counsels given by reflecting and observant age are 
healers sent out from the great-hearted — they are 
as the shadows of Peter passing by. Never let us 



n6 LIFE'S EVENTIDE 

imagine they are valueless because they have been 
often uttered. They bear frequent repetition. Each 
new generation needs them. They are as bread, or, 
more fitly, as seed-corn. They are a part of the 
nation's life. We need to make them intensive as 
well as informational. Never can we impress too 
frequently on youth such convictions as the following : 
That reason must master passion and conscience 
triumph over lust. That there is nothing in the world 
worth sinning for. That perfect virtue is the highest 
element of happiness. That it is always, and under 
all circumstances, better to suffer an injury than to 
inflict an injury. That it is better to die than lie. 
That no one should forget a duty, fail a friend, or 
shirk a promise. That broken laws lead to broken 
hearts. That he alone is noble who hates all vileness 
and respects others as himself. That the power of 
habit is as the chain of destiny, and for this reason 
we should strive to make virtue the habit of our life. 
That total abstinence from intoxicating liquors is a 
wonderful aid to health, morality, and success. That 
without industry and integrity all purposes of real 
advancement are writ in water. That envy is igno- 
rance, and slavish imitation suicide, and each man is 
mainly what he makes himself. That courage, and 
purity, and faithfulness to high ideals, will conquer 
fate, whatever weapons it may wield for our undoing. 
That true religion is not merely a device for escaping 



DUTIES OF AGE 117 

hell - and getting safe to heaven, but manhood at its 
highest. That we are foolish to listen to men who 
would rob us of our celestial hope and give us nothing 
in exchange. That life is, before all things, a dis- 
cipline for eternity, a sphere for the creation of 
character which must endure the scrutiny of the 
Omniscient eye, and that the character we form here 
we shall bear with us into eternity. 

Counsels and principles such as these are of ines- 
timable value. They are, indeed, the very life of the 
soul, affording it at once the soil in which it may root 
itself and the atmosphere in which it may attain its 
finest growth. 

Such counsels it is at once the privilege and the 
duty of age and experience to impart, and it is a 
lovely thing to be able to say of one whose locks are 
ripe and full of awe — 

Around him youths are gathered who can scan 
His countenance so grand and mild, and drink 
The sweet, sad tones of wisdom. 



VII. GROWING OLD BEAUTIFULLY 

Then shall succeed a faithful peace; 
Beautiful friendships tried by sun and wind, 
Durable from the daily dust of life. 
And though with sadder, still with kinder eyes, 
We shall behold all frailties ; we shall haste 
To pardon, and with mellowing minds to bless. 

Stephen Phillips. 

At even, as the good mariner, when he draws near the port, 
lowers his sails, and enters it softly with a weak and gentle 
motion, so ought we to lower the sails of our worldly opera- 
tions, and to return to God with all quietness and peace. 

Dante. 

THERE are various tasks in life which test our 
powers to the full. It is not easy to repress 
envy, to control temper, to conquer discontent, to 
forgive injuries, to trust under calamity, and to 
persevere under failure; but the greatest task of all 
is to grow old beautifully. What a cluster of social 
virtues are needed for this great achievement! A 
cheerful trust in human nature, a perception of "the 
soul of goodness in things evil," sweetness of temper, 
gentleness in demeanor, the toleration of the in- 
firmities of those around us and the checking and 

118 



GROWING OLD BEAUTIFULLY 119 

rebuking of our own, forbearance under what appear 
to be slights and marks of indifference, patience with 
the rudeness of ignorance, a spirit great and wise 
enough to forgive injuries, that fine quality of soul 
which is more swift to give tenderness than to claim 
justice, a gracious blindness to the faults of others 
and a friendly discernment of their casual virtues, — 
these qualities are not easily attained; but when at- 
tained they make old age a shrine to which pilgrims 
come for worship. And God has ordained that these 
lovely qualities and dispositions, like every other 
good thing, should cost something. He has willed 
that they should be a growth and not an imme- 
diate endowment, a moral achievement and not an 
accident. Nor can it be questioned that they build 
nobly who, out of the rude materials of life, fashion 
such a shrine for His indwelling and for man's 
reverence. 

Montaigne, despite his sunny temperament and 
genial philosophy, says: "My age has made me grow 
more pensive and morose." There are few who have 
reached declining years who have not to make a like 
confession. Old age, like every other period of life, 
has its own special perils. Among these may be 
numbered the covetousness which makes it hard to 
part with that which has been so gradually and so 
carefully acquired; the fretfulness which growing 
infirmities of body and mind are almost certain to 



120 LIFE'S EVENTIDE 

create; the inconsiderateness which demands so much 
from ministrant hands and kindly hearts; together 
with the spirit which exalts the past at the expense 
of the present, and which is out of sympathy with 
the hopes and aspirations of a later age. These 
inevitable tendencies make it difficult to grow old 
beautifully. 

Yet, if the analogies of Nature may serve us here, 
the season of Autumn has its own beauty, as well 
as that of Spring, or Summer, together with a fruitage 
which excels them both. Though flowers are droop- 
ing, and leaves are falling, there is wealth in the 
orchard, and purple splendor on the hills, and rich 
hues in the sky at sunset, and an unwonted glory 
in the woods and hedgerows. Even on dull days 
they are bright: 

For o'er the leaves before they fall, 

Such hues hath Nature thrown, 
That the woods wear on sunless days 

A sunlight of their own. 

So age may have a ripeness as a shock of corn 
ready for the garner, and a beauty as of the golden 
sunset or the fading woods, which cannot fail to 
attract and charm. "God hath made everything 
beautiful in his time"; and there is a beauty of age 
no less than of youth. Some lives, indeed, break 
into fairest flower at their close. They are like the 



GROWING OLD BEAUTIFULLY 121 

chrysanthemum, which blossoms when the year is 
dying, and when the hoar frost sparkles on its petals. 
For them the best wine has been kept until the last. 
They have been mellowed by experience and sancti- 
fied by sorrow; age has charged their voices with a 
deeper tenderness, touched their lips with a kindlier 
wisdom, and invested their souls with a diviner 
charity. They have experienced the fierceness of 
the battle, felt the sting of failure, and realized the 
emptiness of success. Memories of personal weak- 
ness before the strength of evil, the allurements of 
pleasure, and the power of passion, have made them 
pitiful and more indulgent, and they are swift to help 
and succor where others would hasten to condemn. 
It is thus that old age grows beautiful and inspires in 
some tender watcher a lovely longing such as that 
expressed by the poet in the lines : 



Your head, oh, let my bosom bear, 

Your head that moves my love to tears, 

With all its wealth of snow-white hair, 
Marking your white, white years! 

Out of the life that lures and stains 
Give me one hour of perfect grace, 

Till I forget that aught remains 
But your white angel-face. 

And sleep, oh, on my bosom sleep, 
That I with God may also seem — 

So all my life I safe shall keep 
One innocent, white dream ! 



122 LIFE'S EVENTIDE 



Beautiful Old Age 



The weight of years does not necessarily chill the 
heart or sour the disposition. There are many 
furrowed faces which are beautiful, because wreathed 
in smiles and beaming with loving-kindness. They 
are like a wrinkled sea, with a track of sunset light 
shimmering across it. There are thin and age-worn 
hands which have clasped our own as warmly as the 
hands of vigorous youth. There are aged hearts 
which have yearned over us with a tenderness which 
lusty manhood never knew. Old age can be marvel- 
ously endearing. What pathos there may be in a 
trembling voice ! What eloquence may dwell in 
a furrowed brow where the plowshare of suffering 
has been at work! How naturally may the "hoary 
head" become a "crown of glory" ! 

Nor spring nor summer beauty hath such grace, 
As I have seen in an autumnal face. 

How venerable is the heart which has borne the 
battle and the stress of three-quarters of a century! 
Can anything on earth be conceived more lovely than 
a parent whom old age has beautified by fine living? 
Surely the loveliest vision we have ever looked upon 
is the vision of a tender and ministrant mother, 
consecrated by age — her hair whitening with the 
blossoms of the tree of life, her face a benediction, 



GROWING OLD BEAUTIFULLY 123 

her voice divinest music, her smile a glint of heaven. 
There is no hope for the man who does not feel 
nobly proud and strangely pure when he enters the 
house of God with such a mother leaning on his 
arm. The motherless angel must envy such a man, 
and long for such a ministry and service as that 
which supports and guides those faltering steps. Let 
a son so blest cherish such a mother as a sacred trust. 
Let him, if he have the means, clothe her venerable 
grace in silk of lavender, or dove, or silvery gray. Let 
spotless frills fall over her withered hands, and lovely 
lace enwrap her shoulders, such as beseems her 
heavenly beauty. It was when such a one, after an 
embrace at parting, left one of her white hairs upon 
our shoulder, that he wrote: 

Only a thread of silver, 

From the locks which once were gold; 
Only a thread of silver, 

As a sign of growing old; 
Only a thread of silver, 

From the brow so broad and fair: 
But there's dawn as well as twilight 

In that thread of silver hair. 

Carlyle's tender love for his mother atones for much 
of his ill-humor; Pope's affectionate care of his aged 
mother makes us forget his cynicism; and John 
Ruskin grows more lovely in our thought as we 
read, as written by himself, his mother's epitaph, 
who fell on sleep at ninety: "Here, beside my 



124 LIFE'S EVENTIDE 

father's body, I have laid my mother's ; nor was 
dearer earth ever returned to earth, nor purer life 
recorded in heaven." 

How Age Becomes Beautiful 

We are all sculptors shaping both body and soul 
in such fashion as we ourselves ordain. The subtle 
chisels of thought and feeling are daily at work upon 
our features. There is a distinct connection between 
a beautiful face and a beautiful life. Any inward 
nobleness begins at once to refine the countenance, 
and any inward meanness or sensuality to imbrute 
it. We receive or inherit our features from our 
ancestors, but we make our own countenance. What 
we call the countenance is that cast and motion, 
that character and expression, which the features 
have acquired through our inward and mental habits 
— the constant pressure of the mind and the per- 
petual repetition of its acts. There is no limit to 
the transfiguring power of goodness. Goodness can 
make a plain face beautiful through the fine ethereal 
light of the spirit within. It is the grace and beauty 
of the indwelling spirit which makes a face truly 
beautiful, and that with a beauty which defies the 
ravages of time. We have all met worn and wrinkled 
women of whom we have had to say : 

Her face was pinched and pale and thin, 
But splendor struck it from within. 



GROWING OLD BEAUTIFULLY 125 

"In thy face have I seen the Eternal," said Bunsen, 
as he gazed into the tender eyes of his wife just 
before he died. 

One of our thinkers has said that every face ought 
to be beautiful at forty; and another, that no old 
person has a right to be ugly, because he has had 
all his life in which to grow beautiful. That is to 
say, that life's opportunities of nobleness, if well 
used, should create so much loveliness within, that it 
must come to the surface in some form of winsome 
and attractive grace. The furrows plowed by 
suffering in which angels of pity lurk, the transfigura- 
tion of pleasant smiles, the sunshine beaming from 
kindly eyes, the restful lines about the lips which tell 
of self-control, the serene and lofty brow where great 
thoughts dwell as in a palace — these things make for 
the beauty which no parent has transmitted in the 
process of heredity, but which is born only of habitual 
nobleness and graciousness within. 

There is a gradually increasing beauty which only 
comes to perfection in old age, and this beauty is 
shaped and molded by the loveliness within. We 
have seen sweeter smiles on a lip of seventy than we 
ever saw on a lip of seventeen. Features "icily 
regular" with a heart of ice beneath have no real 
beauty. To quote from Spenser — 

Our Love doth loathe disdainful nicitee. 



126 LIFE'S EVENTIDE 

How Kindness Beautifies 

Of all the qualities which, like invisible sculptors, 
shape both the features and the soul into beauty, 
kindness, which is the effluence of love, is the most 
potent. "What do we live for, if not to make life 
less difficult for each other?" asks George Eliot. 
Those who thus live grow divinely beautiful. Kind 
thoughts, kind words, kind deeds, are masters in the 
realm of the beautiful — they fashion angels out of 
mortals. The poet has caught this conception who 
writes : 

No angel she : she hath no budding wings ; 

No mystic halo circles her bright hair; 
But lo ! the infinite grace of little things, 

Wrought for dear love's sake, makes her very fair. 

Do we not all cherish some gracious and uplifting 
memory of one who has been thus made beautiful, 
one full of goodness, full of cheerfulness, full of help- 
ful hope, yet as unconscious of her winsome gifts as a 
star of its own shining? Such a one rises before me 
in retrospect as I write, a woman silver-haired and 
with a countenance o'er which the dove of peace 
visibly brooded. Through much toil and sorrow, 
through lost love and hopes blown out like lamps in 
tempest, she had come to her inheritance of minis- 
trant sympathy — an inheritance which has enriched 
multitudes, lifting up the careworn, heartening the 



GROWING OLD BEAUTIFULLY 127 

stupid- and the dull, sheltering the wounded and the 
broken, cheering the despairing, befriending the for- 
saken, and rescuing the lost. Hers was a tender- 
ness which came upon the drooping and the sad like 
the south wind upon a bank of violets. Hers was 
the genius of love and beneficence — the genius of the 
heart. A devoted wife and the mother of many 
children, it might have been thought that her arms 
were already full. But there was room for many 
more in that kindly harbor of refuge from the 
blinding tempest and the pitiless sea. No one who 
stood in her presence could feel the desolation im- 
plied in the thought that "no one cares." She could 
not come into contact with any human creature 
without the human touch. In an instant soul met 
soul through the grace of answering sympathy, 
though it might be only a little soul in a worn and 
ill-clad body that entered into touch with hers. She 
seemed to belong to the sad and unfortunate, and 
with both hands and without reservation she gave to 
them the riches of her being. If she bought a flower 
in the street, its beauty seemed to find a voice in her 
winsome speech addressed to her who sold it, and 
the tired shop-girl from whom she purchased any- 
thing was refreshed by her gentle demeanor as with 
the falling of God's dew. One felt in her presence 
that if the whole world were composed of such souls 
it would be a Paradise. There was a heaven in her 



128 LIFE'S EVENTIDE 

face which made it easy to believe in heaven, and 
though asking for nothing again, she did not miss 
her due reward. A voice seemed to move before her 
steps which said : 

Go to! thy love 
Shall chant itself its own beatitudes 
After its own life-working. A child's kiss 
Set on thy sighing lips, shall make thee glad; 
A poor man served by thee, shall make thee rich, 
A sick man helped by thee, shall make thee strong; 
Thou shalt be served thyself by every sense 
Of service which thou renderest. 

Kindness is nothing less than a continual imitation 
of the divine action, and it makes the soul divine by 
which it is cherished. 



Love's Mastery 

It is an inspiration to note how beauty and noble- 
ness of this fine order create beauty and engender 
nobleness. An Eastern sage says in the Gulistan: 
"One day a piece of perfumed clay came to me from 
the hand of a friend. I asked: 'Art thou musk? art 
thou amber?' It replied: 'I was a worthless piece 
of clay, but having for a season associated with the 
rose, its beneficent virtue has penetrated me: without 
that I should still be common earth/ " 

Thank God, there are souls in the world with 
which we cannot come into vital contact and remain 



GROWING OLD BEAUTIFULLY 129 

common earth. Virtue goes out of tnem to make 

us nobler. 

All things by a law divine 
In one another's being mingle, 

and the influence of spirit on spirit no science has 
yet measured. Dante said of his love for Beatrice, 
and its power on his own soul, "I had no longer 
an enemy in the world. Such a flame of charity 
she kindled in me, making me forgive every one 
who had done me any wrong." It is recorded of 
Edward Irving that he went about making men 
noble by thinking them so. The late Mrs. Oliphant 
said, "He had so much celestial light in his eyes 
that he unconsciously assigned to every one whom 
he addressed a standing ground in some degree 
equal to his own. He addressed ordinary individuals 
as if they were heroes and princes ; charged a can- 
didate for the ministry to be at once an apostle, 
a gentleman, and a scholar; made poor astonished 
women, in tiny London apartments, feel themselves 
ladies in the light of his courtesy; and unconsciously 
elevated every man he talked with into the ideal man 
he ought to have been." 

It is impossible to overestimate the influence of 
contact with men essentially noble and upright. 
The Divine Word becomes a power indeed when 
it is made flesh and dwells among us in pure and 
consecrated lives. How much better a beautiful 
9 



130 LIFE'S EVENTIDE 

life than a beautiful book as a stimulus to nobleness! 
"Living epistles" are our greatest need — 

Bright affluent spirits, breathing but to bless, 

Whose presence cheers men's eyes and warms their hearts, 

Whose lavish goodness this old world renews, 

Like the free sunshine and the liberal air. 

Dean Stanley says of Dr. Arnold and his pupils, 
"His very presence seemed to create a new spring 
of health and vigor within them, and to give to 
life a new interest and elevation." "It is astonishing," 
says Morley, "how much good goodness makes." 
Old John Brown said, "For a settler in a new 
country, one good believing man is worth a thousand 
without character." "Men of character," says Emer- 
son, "are the conscience of the society to which 

they belong," 

No life 
Can be pure in its purpose and strong in its strife, 
And all life not be purer and stronger thereby. 

Love's Immortality 

Benevolence, being the divinest of all human 
attributes, as it is the most God-like, the Divine 
Father gives it something of His own beauty and 
His own immortality. When the saintly Dr. Payson 
said, with dying breath, "I long to hand a full cup 
of happiness to every human being," his face glowed 
like that of an angel, and he was prepared to consort 



GROWING OLD BEAUTIFULLY 131 

with seraphs. Life is love, and when love is allowed 
full play there is really no such thing as growing 
old. The soul grows larger and diviner, and drops 
its encumbering clay at death to move on unfettered 
toward its heavenly destiny. "The angels," says 
Swedenborg, with deep, divine insight, "are for ever 
growing younger." 

The sons and daughters of love never grow old, 
neither does their work ever die, because they have 
received answer to the prayer: "Let the beauty of 
the Lord our God be upon us, and establish Thou the 
work of our hands upon us ; yea, the work of our 
hands establish Thou it." No one can question love's 
sweet mastery. It is the soil in which all beautiful 
character takes root. It is the atmosphere in which 
it reaches its finest growth. Its feet are as the feet 
of spring-tide : 

Flowers laugh before it in their beds, 
And fragrance in its footing treads. 

The saying is no less of heaven because it comes from 
Islam — "Smiling in your brother's face is charity." 
The nature of love is to love others out of oneself, to 
desire to be one with them, and from itself to make 
them happy. So Swedenborg taught, and this message 
he surely received from the angels. 

Love is the essential life of man. In it he has the 
light of his life. Through it comes the happiness of 



132 LIFE'S EVENTIDE 

his days, through it his resemblance to the Deity, 
through it the blessedness he can bestow on others. 
It makes the bliss of others he has blessed his own — 
the purest and the loftiest. 

Furthermore, love discrowns death. Because of 
its assimilation with God it confidently looks for 
immortality. Born from heaven, love lifts its liege- 
men into its native home. One of its grandest offices 
is the creation of souls 

Whose very sweetness yieldeth proof 
That they were born for immortality. 

The spirits whom love has made beautiful move 
with unfaltering steps to the final home of love. The 
liegemen of love stand on the threshold of the life 
eternal. They are the chosen guests of the great 
King who has spread in heaven's high palace the 
marriage supper of the Lamb. Sacred, pitying love, 
which in its sweet humility is ever ready to take 
the lowest place, is the friend to whom He ever 
saith, "Go up higher." Death shall not destroy but 
only emancipate the souls which cherish this divine 
attribute. That which they have learned on earth 
they shall practice in heaven. "They rest from their 
labors" — from all which has depressed and wearied 
— "but their works do follow them." They follow 
them alike on earth and in heaven. If they have 
made themselves friends of the needy and the 



GROWING OLD BEAUTIFULLY 133 

desolate — though it be only through "the mammon 
of unrighteousness" — the spirits they have blessed 
shall sweep down with choral song and in festal train 
to "receive them into everlasting habitations." Mean- 
while on earth the love they kindled shall spread its 
sacred fire from answering soul to soul until ten 
thousand lives are gladdened by its light and warmth. 
It shall overleap all boundaries and bless all lands. 
The mother brooding over her first-born shall share 
its kindly breath, although she wist not whence it 
comes. The toiler in the slums and evil places of 
the city shall realize its impelling power as he moves 
in quest of the hundredth sheep which has gone 
astray; and the missionary standing alone in the land 
of ice and snow shall be cheered by its benison as by 
the warm wafture of an angel's wing. 

Enough, if something from our hands have power 

To live, and act, and serve the future hour; 

And if, as toward the silent tomb we go, 

Through love, through hope, and faith's transcendent dower, 

We feel that we are greater than we know. 

Examples of Beautiful Old Age 

Since in the moral realm example is so potent 
as an instructor, it will be profitable to refer to a 
few elect and dedicated spirits who present to us the 
inspiring spectacle of a beautiful old age. And 
it is not without significance that such examples 



i 3 4 LIFE'S EVENTIDE 

are without exception found "in the way of righteous- 
ness." This fruit is of "God's husbandry/' and is not 
found among the servants of the world, the lovers of 
pleasure, or the slaves of sin. 

There is John Milton, who, holding that "he who 
would write a great poem must first make his life 
a great poem," lives day by day as under the great 
Taskmaster's eye; who regards himself as "com- 
missioned to inbreed and cherish in a great people 
the seeds of virtue"; who sings 

With mortal voice unchanged 
To hoarse or mute, though fallen on evil days 
And evil tongues, 

and of whom in an hour when the throne of England 
was begirt with profligates and flippant witlings, 
Wordsworth says : 

Thy soul was like a star, and dwelt apr.rt; 

Thou had'st a voice whose sound was like the sea : 

Pure as the naked heavens, majestic, free. 

There is John Wesley, who, having settled the great 
question as to his relation to God and to eternity, 
was one of the happiest of men. To a friend who 
imagined that he thought religion inconsistent with 
cheerfulness, he wrote: "Are you for having as 
much joy in life as you can? So am I. Do you 
endeavor to keep alive your taste for all the inno- 
cent pleasures of life? So do I. Do you refuse no 



GROWING OLD BEAUTIFULLY 135 

pleasure but what is a hindrance to some greater 
good, or has a tendency to some evil? It is my very 
rule.'' In his eighty-third year we find him preaching 
and writing with a spirit as brave and a face as bright 
as in his prime, while his calm faith, his serene 
courage, and his flame-like zeal were maintained until 
nature was exhausted and the weary wheels of life at 
last stood still. 

There is Charles Wesley, the poet brother of the 
founder of Methodism, in the prime of his life a 
preacher unsurpassed in power and pathos, growing 
old like a shock of corn ripening for the garner. 
Toward the end of his career he preached with his 
eyes closed, and with bent and listening head, as 
though waiting for whispers from unseen realms. 
His last hours were marked by a sweet and quiet 
peace, fitting prelude to the peace of heaven — while 
his swan-song was as follows : 

In age and feebleness extreme, 
Who shall a helpless worm redeem? 
Jesus, my only hope Thou art, 
Strength of my failing flesh and heart ; 
Oh, could I catch one smile from Thee, 
And drop into eternity ! 

There is Dr. Samuel Johnson, himself greater than 
anything which he achieved, working away valiantly 
to the close of life, and bearing the weight of his 
fame with a heart so kindly that he weeps over 



136 LIFE'S EVENTIDE 

the death-bed of a poor old servant, and with a 
conscience so tender that he stands bareheaded for 
an hour in Uttoxeter market-place, doing penance 
for refusing to mind his father's bookstall there fifty 
years before. "He that would pass the latter part 
of his life with honor and decency," he writes, "must, 
when he is young, consider that he shall one day 
be old; and remember, when he is old, that he has 
once been young." And again he writes: "Piety 
is the only proper and adequate relief of decaying 
man." "O man," wrote Cowper — 

O man, immortal by a double prize, 

By fame on earth — by glory in the skies ! 

There is Michael Faraday, the philosopher and 
scientist, recording in declining years the experience: 
"My life has been a happy one, and all I have desired. 
The progress of years, amounting to three-score and 
ten, has produced for me gentle decay. This has 
taken place in such a way as to make the evening 
of life a blessing. ... I bow before Him who is 
Lord of all, and hope to be kept waiting patiently for 
His time and mode of releasing me, according to His 
divine word and the great and precious promises 
whereby His people are made partakers of a divine 
nature." 

There is William Wordsworth, a dedicated spirit, 
moving day by day amid the lofty and inspiring soli- 



GROWING OLD BEAUTIFULLY 137 

tudes.of Nature, yet conscious all the while of the 
might and dignity of his own soul. He cherishes 
the sweet belief that every flower enjoys the air it 
breathes, and in the silent faces of the clouds he reads 
unutterable love. The glory of heaven is seated in 
his eyes as he steps westward toward 



That imperial Palace whence he came, 



while 



Rapt in a still communion which transcends 
The imperfect offices of praise and prayer, 
His mind is a thanksgiving to the Power 
That made him; it is blessedness and love. 

There is Lord Shaftesbury, the fitting motto of whose 
house was "Love — Serve." By his devotion to the 
poor, the suffering, the unfortunate, the desolate, the 
broken, he won for himself the title "The People's 
Peer," and royally maintained it by constant, self- 
denying service. After pleading the cause of the 
wretched and the homeless in the House of Peers, 
when its doors were closed he often moved among 
them by lantern-light as they huddled together for 
warmth under the bridges of the Thames. His con- 
stant prayer was that he might die in harness, and 
the prayer was granted. Yet after fourscore years 
of life had been given he was not content to die, be- 
cause, to use his own words, "he could not bear to 
leave the world with so much misery in it." 



138 LIFE'S EVENTIDE 

There is David Livingstone, who devoted his splen- 
did powers to the service of the trampled slaves 
of Africa, and of whom Stanley writes when he finds 
him in the wilderness, "His gentleness never forsakes 
him, his hopefulness never deserts. No harassing 
anxieties can make him complain. . . . Each Sun- 
day morning he gathers his little flock about him and 
reads prayers and a chapter in the Bible, and delivers 
a short address, while the natives say as they pass by 
him, 'The blessing of God rest on you !' " At last 
he is found dead, kneeling in his tent with his head 
buried in his hands upon the pillow, while his spirit 
has been wafted to heaven on the breath of a prayer 
for dark and stricken Africa. 

There is Lord Tennyson, who gave to the Vic- 
torian age "perfect vision in perfect language," and 
whose life was as pure as that of his own ideal knight, 
King Arthur. Firm in the constancy of an immortal 
hope, 'twas he who sang to the Lover and Redeemer 
of his soul : 

Thou wilt not leave us in the dust : 
Thou madest man, he knows not why; 
He thinks he was not made to die ; 

And Thou hast made him: Thou art just 

Sustained by this supreme belief, "he fought his 
doubts and gathered strength" through all his great 
career, until, having thrilled the English-speaking 
world for fifty years with the magic of his song, its 



GROWING OLD BEAUTIFULLY 139 

last cadences fell on the ears of aspiring youth in the 
pathetic lines : 

young Mariner ! 
You from the haven 
Under the sea-cliff, 
You that are watching 
The gray Magician 
With eyes of wonder : 

1 am Merlin, 
And I am dying, 
I am Merlin 

Who follow The Gleam. 



There is William Ewart Gladstone, the scholar, the 
statesman, the orator with the music of the morning 
breathing from his lips — the grandest man who ever 
adorned the Parliament of Britain. But, more than 
all, the humble Christian, whose life and hope were 
built on ''The Impregnable Rock of Holy Scripture." 
The man who in all his great achievements took his 
burdens to God in prayer, and who has left behind 
him, for the guidance of all who follow, the great 
precept, "Be inspired with the belief that life is a 
great and noble calling; not a mean and grovelling 
thing, that we are to shuffle through as we can, but 
an elevated and lofty destiny." 

There is George Frederick Watts, a "Dweller in the 
Innermost," whose artistic genius was consecrated to 
the divinest ends, and who was ever faithful to the 
motto of his choice: "The Utmost for the Highest." 



140 LIFE'S EVENTIDE 

In his ripe old age he would walk in the sweet old 
garden of his Surrey home discoursing of heavenly 
things, and when the Master gently called him the 
watchers knew the heaven he had entered by the 
heaven he had left behind. Of death he had no fear. 
The sentiment he embodied in his art was the 
sentiment of his trustful life, and was expressed by 
him in the lovely utterance, "My favorite thought 
recognizes Death as a kind nurse who says, 'Now 
then, children, you must go to bed and wake up in the 
the morning.' " 

There is Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, whose 
hoary head was truly "a crown of glory," and for 
whom life never lost its poetry and romance. He 
kept the heart of youth long enough to be lyrical 
about his own white hairs. In his "Autumn Within," 
one of his last poems, with quiet submission to the 
ebb of life, he writes : 



There is silence: the dead leaves 
Fall and rustle, and are still; 
Beats no flail upon the sheaves, 
Comes no murmur from the mill. 



When "the shadow feared of man" stands by his side, 
he looks upon it with a gentle smile, assured that it 
is but a shadow; and for those who fear lest death 
should be the end of all, he seems to send down from 
the sky the sweet refrain : 



GROWING OLD BEAUTIFULLY 141 

Slowly, slowly up the wall, 

Steals the sunshine, steals the shade. 



Upward steals the life of man, 
As the sunshine from the wall. 
From the wall into the sky, 
From the roof along the spire; 
Ah ! the souls of those that die 
Are but sunbeams lifted higher. 

There is Robert Browning, the man "who believed 
in soul, and was very sure of God." Obscure in utter- 
ance, but magnificent in appeal, his was the prophet's 
certainty of transcendent truth, coupled with the 
prophet's lofty faith in the final triumph of good over 
evil. For him, in all 

Of power and beauty in the world 
The mightiness of love was curled 
Inextricably round about. 

Because this was so, there was no sinning, suffering 
human soul which he could surrender to perdition, 
or conceive as being "cast as rubbish to the void." 
For himself, he is a fighter whom nothing can 
dismay : 

One who never turned his back, but marched breast forward, 

Never doubted clouds would break, 
Never dreamed, though right was worsted, wrong would 

triumph, 
Held we fall to rise, are baffled to fight better, 
Sleep to wake. 

Such are a few examples selected from the ranks 
of the illustrious — the foremost among many 



142 LIFE'S EVENTIDE 

brethren — who in the service of their kind and 
through consecration to the Highest have grown old 
beautifully. And how gloriously this list might be 
extended if we turned to the record of "honorable 
women, not a few," by whom life has been regarded 
as a sacred trust, and service in life as at once a 
solemn obligation and a supreme delight! And what 
of the great procession, calm and beautiful, moving 
through the ages of whom we have no record — 
stars which have not risen on our horizon, but which 
nevertheless have contributed in their degree to 
make night glorious, and whom God hath also called 
by their names and guided through the deeps of 
heaven. 

E'en as we muse there crowd upon the mind 

The lofty virtues nursed in strife; the Will 

That scorned dishonor; Goodness even in Death 

Abhorring Evil; Right defying Wrong; 

The stern self-sacrifice of souls afire 

For perill'd altars, and for hearths profaned; 

The generous chivalry which shields the weak, 

And dares the oppressor's worst; love guarding love 

From rapine, or, as God's executor, 

Dealing forth vengeance on the stubborn foe 

And mercy to the vanquished; all along 

The ages, names the noblest and the best, 

Which kindle nobleness for evermore. 



VIII. THE INEVITABLE TRANSITION 

There is no death ! What seems so is transition. 

This life of mortal breath 
Is but the suburb of the life elysian, 

Whose portal we call Death. 

Longfellow. 

Not by all the lamps of worldly wisdom clustered in one 
blaze can we guide our steps so securely as by fixing our eyes 
on this inevitable cloud, through which all must pass, which 
at every step becomes darker and more threatening to the 
children of this world, but to the children of faith and 
obedience still thins away as they approach, to melt at length 
and dissolve into that glorious light which knows no setting. 
— Derwent Coleridge. 

WE do not wish to write unreal things about 
death. It is an event which no thoughtful 
man can contemplate without solemn concern. We 
cannot regard with indifference the boundary line 
between time and eternity, or think lightly of the 
hour when the last sands of life are falling, and the 
beatings of the heart grow faint, and the faces of our 
loved ones melt slowly away in the gathering haze, 
while sad farewells are breathed from lips that quiver 
and from hearts that bleed. 

Nor can we forget that some of the best men 
who have trod our earth have regarded death with 

143 



144 LIFE'S EVENTIDE 

aversion, if not indeed with fear. To the noble Dr. 
Johnson the thought of it was a perpetual burden, 
and there are few who will not sympathize with 
the touching prayer of the blind Dr. Matheson, where, 
in an essay on "The Value of Easter Day," he pleads: 
"Reveal to me that angel at the grave! Give me a 
view of death as a hallowed thing! It has long been 
to me the King of Terrors. My gravestone has held 
a specter. Take away the specter and put an angel 
there." 

The mood of all is not by any means that of the 
Christian thinker, who, seeing a painter depict Death 
in the usual fashion as a skeleton with a scythe, re- 
marked, "For my part I should paint Death as an 
angel with a golden key." 

Nevertheless, we are fully persuaded that death 
has been grieviously misunderstood and invested 
with terrors which are but the phantoms of the 
brain. Take, for example, the imagined pains of 
dying. To fancy that death is physically painful, 
that the soul is violently wrenched from the body, 
and that the act of separation is a terrible experi- 
ence, is utterly opposed to sound reason. It is to 
attribute acute sensibility to a circumstance which, 
in the nature of things, implies the total absence of 
sensibility. The truth is that death is but a falling 
asleep, and the one act is as unconscious and as 
painless as the other. 



THE INEVITABLE TRANSITION 145 

All - medical testimony goes to prove that the 
period of death, instead of being a period of suffer- 
ing, is a period of deepening unconsciousness. Even 
in those cases where pain has been suffered in the 
last struggle for life the final touch of death lulls 
the patient into a merciful insensibility, and we go 
out of the world as unconsciously as we came into 
it. "The sense of death," as Shakespeare has it, "is 
most in apprehension," and unless the life has been 
so vile that conscience is as the shaken torch of a 
fury, even fear of the unknown fades away with 
the ebbing tide of life. The act of dying does not 
hurt us. Sir James Paget said that in all his wide 
experience he had scarcely known a patient who, 
when the end came, regarded it with fear or with 
aversion. The dying man is tired and glad to fall 
on sleep. The immense majority of people die 
imperceptibly. The common experience is that 
described by Hood: 

We thought her dying when she slept, 
And sleeping when she died. 



The Beneficence of Death 

The beneficence of death is evident from the fact 

that no thoughtful man would desire an immortality 

on this earth. The wisdom of this will appear if 

we consider for a moment what such a condition 

10 



146 LIFE'S EVENTIDE 

would involve. If we did not die we could never 
have any other life than the present. We could 
have no future. We should be doomed for ever 
to see the same faces, to tread the weary round of 
the same duties, and to participate in the same limited 
round of pleasures until existence would become a 
positive burden. The eternal monotony of affairs 
would become utterly intolerable. Sated and utterly 
weary, to lie down and sleep forever would be an 
unspeakable boon. 

The Irish have a beautiful legend concerning an 
island of rest set in the center of a lake, to which, 
when men were weary of life, they could retire and 
find the sleep of death. The keels of human 
voyagers would never cease to grate on such a shore, 
if they could thus escape an earthly immortality. 
Give the human race an earthly immortality, and 
you would exclude them from everything greater 
and diviner than this world could furnish. 

Still more terrible would be the gift of immortality 
to a single individual in this changeful world. Cut 
off from all equal community of experience with 
those around him, he would see his loved ones expire 
one by one, leaving him utterly alone. His love 
would be an agony and his memory a torment. His 
life would be one continual prayer for the mercy 
of death. 

Death, therefore, is necessary and benignant. "It 



THE INEVITABLE TRANSITION 147 

would be a curse," says Epictetus, "upon ears of corn 
not to be reaped ; and we ought to know that it would 
be a curse upon man not to die." And as for our last 
resting-place, what matter where it is if it only be a 
place of quiet, where the feet of the loved ones we 
have left behind may sometimes be heard in the 
pleasant grass. Very beautiful are the closing lines 
of the last sonnet from the pen of P. B. Marston, 
entitled "My Grave" : 

Lay me beneath some plot of country grass, 
Where flowers may spring and birds sing overhead; 
Whereto one coming, some fair eve in spring, 

Between the day-fall and the tender night, 
Might pause awhile, his friend remembering, 

And hear low words breathed through the failing light, 
Spoken to him by the wind, whispering, 

"Now he sleeps long, who had so long to fight." 

What Is Death? 

Before we shrink from death as from a stern and 
terrible calamity, we should pause and ask what it 
is, and what it means. Is it a personal agent? 
Is it a definite force? Is it a substantive cause, 
working effects? No! it is none of these. It is 
simply the shadow of God when He bends over 
existence to change or to glorify it. In the world 
of Nature it is only a transition and the instrument 
of life. All its power in the physical realm is 
reduced to changing the forms of matter which it 



148 LIFE'S EVENTIDE 

cannot destroy, and which life again takes from it. 
Its perceptible object is not to annihilate existences, 
but only to multiply them. It merely dissolves the 
organism; it does not touch the essential life which 
built it up. It merely disintegrates the tissues; the 
vital energy escapes it. Why, then, should we com- 
mission it in the grand world of spirit with absolute 
power? Why have we crowned it "king of terrors"? 
Why have we deified it, setting it above life, and 
even above God? It may wear upon its head "the 
likeness of a kingly crown" ; but when we drag this 
imaginary monarch into the light, it dissolves like 
those once stately forms of kings and emperors in 
old tombs, when exposed to the living air. It is 
indeed a thing so poor and feeble that it cannot 
destroy a grain of dust. How, then, shall it destroy 
that spirit which is the breath of God within us? 
The weapon with which it threatens us is a phantom 
dagger, not a real one, and we may "defy its point." 
Let it take away our bodily organism, borrowed from 
the earth we tread, and, separating its particles, 
return it "to the dust as it was" ; but, defiant of its 
power — nay, rising fuller of life because of it — our 
"spirit shall return to God who gave it." 

The Christian's Faith 

Certain it is that for the Christian believer this 
transition, which we call death, however stern it 



THE INEVITABLE TRANSITION 149 

may- appear, is no calamity, but only a glad release. 
Whatever may have happened at the grave of Christ 
and in the matter of His appearances to His disciples 
and others, after death, one thing is certain — that 
His grave was the birthplace of the indestructible 
belief that death is vanquished and that there is life 
eternal. "The breaker has gone up before us," and by 
His resurrection we have the knowledge which is 
certitude, and the hope which is confidence, of citizen- 
ship in an Eternal City, and of an inheritance among 
the saints in light. 

Those are no empty words of the greatest of the 
apostles, where he says: "For me to live is Christ, 
and to die is gain." It is in this spirit and in this 
confidence that Christian believers, from the begin- 
ning until now, have confronted the shadow which we 
call death. This triumphant confidence rings, as from 
a silver trumpet, in the psean of Paul sounding from 
the Mamertine dungeon and on the eve of dissolution : 
"I am now ready to be offered, and the time of my 
departure is at hand. I have fought a good fight, 
I have finished my course, I have kept the faith. 
Henceforth there is laid up for me a crown of right- 
eousness, which the Lord, the righteous Judge, shall 
give me at that day: and not to me only, but unto 
all them also that love His appearing." This clarion 
voice has been echoed and reechoed by Christian souls 
through all the ages. For them Christ has "abolished 



ISO LIFE'S EVENTIDE 

death," so far as the fear of annihilation is con- 
cerned. For them — 



Death is a setting free 

From life's captivity. 

Through life, through death, O soul, 

To God the goal. 



For them there is only one form of death to be 
feared, and that is the ceasing of upward striving, 
the surrender of hope, the loss of the touch of 
God upon their lives. 

Christian faith discrowns death, strips it of all its 
imaginary terrors; nay, it would fain extinguish its 
very name, regarding it only as the portal of the life 
eternal. The change it makes is but the unclothing 
of the soul of it earthly vestment, a natural departure 
into the purely spiritual world. 

Count Hopken, a friend and disciple of Sweden- 
borg's, tells us that he regarded death "as being 
hardly of greater moment than the drinking of a 
glass of water." To Swedenborg himself it was 
a welcome transition. He believed he had the 
divine assurance that his life would be prolonged 
until his last and greatest book was finished. That 
being done, he named the day on which he 
should die, whereat his housekeeper tells us he 
was so pleased that she could only make the 
comparison that "his pleasure was such as if she 



THE INEVITABLE TRANSITION 151 

herself were going to have a holiday, to go to 
some merry-making." 

William Lloyd Garrison, the champion of liberty 
and lover of mankind, said, ''Death itself to me is 
not terrible, it is not repulsive, it is not to be 
deplored. I see in it as clear an evidence of divine 
wisdom and beneficence as I do in the birth of a 
child, in the works of creation, in all the arrange- 
ments and operations of nature. I neither fear nor 
regret its power. I neither expect nor supplicate to 
be exempted from its legitimate action. It is not to 
be chronicled among calamities ; it is not to be styled 
'a mysterious dispensation of divine providence'; it 
is scarcely rational to talk of being resigned to it. For 
what is more natural — what more universal — what 
more impartial — what more serviceable — what more 
desirable: in God's own time, hastened neither by our 
ignorance nor our folly?" 

Whittier was very confident of the harmlessness 
of his dissolution. He said to a friend, ''The little 
circumstance of death will make no difference to 
me. I shall have the same friends in the other 
world that I have here — the same lovers, and 
aspirations, and occupations. If it were not so I 
should not be myself, and surely I shall not lose 
my identity!" How lovely also are the lines of the 
Quaker poet, written in old age and in contemplation 
of his last hour: 



152 LIFE'S EVENTIDE 

Far off, and faint as echoes of a dream, 

The songs of boyhood seem; 

Yet on our Autumn boughs, unflown with Spring, 

The evening thrushes sing. 

The hour draws near, howe'er delay'd and late, 
When at the Eternal Gate 

We leave the words and works we call our own 
And lift void hands alone 

For Love to fill. Our nakedness of soul 
Brings to that gate no toll; 
Giftless we come to Him who all things gives, 
And live because He lives. 



The death of Beethoven was peculiarly impressive. 
He had been visibly sinking, when suddenly he revived 
and a bright smile illumined his features, as he softly 
murmured, "I shall hear in heaven." 

Melanchthon, when dying, being asked by his 
friends if he wanted anything, replied, "Nothing but 
heaven." As Sir Walter Raleigh was on his way 
to execution, he saw an old friend in the crowd 
unable to approach the scafifold. "Farewell," cried 
Sir Walter, "I know not what shift you will make, 
but I am sure to have a place"; and when he 
mounted the scaffold he kissed the ax, and remarked 
that it was a "sharp medicine, but a sound cure for 
all diseases." In similar vein, Sir Thomas More, 
when brought to the place of execution, noticing 
that the scaffold was weak, turned to the Lieutenant 
of the Tower and said, "I pray you, Mr. Lieutenant, 



THE INEVITABLE TRANSITION 153 

see me up safe, and for my coming down let me 
shift for myself." "The best of all is, God is with 
us," said the dying Wesley. The last words of J. Q. 
Adams were, "It is the last of earth"; and those of 
Washington, "It is well." "My faith is strong," ex- 
claimed William Ewart Gladstone, when the last 
summons came. "Mr. Venn," said his physician to 
that saint of God when dying, "you cannot die at 
present; your joy is too great to permit you to 
do so." 

"They say I am growing old," said the venerable 
Dr. Guthrie, "because my hair is silvered, and there 
are crow's feet on my forehead, and my step is not 
so firm and elastic as before. But they are mistaken. 
That is not me. The knees are weak, but the knees are 
not me. The brow is wrinkled, but the brow is not me. 
This is the house I live in. But I am young — younger 
than I ever was before." Dr. Norman Macleod, 
who when in health was one of the happiest of men, 
"within the limits of becoming mirth," when he came 
to the closing scene of his life, said, "All is peace 
— a perfect calm. I have glimpses of heaven that no 
pen, or words, or tongue, can describe." "Never say 
of me that I am dead," said Robert Browning to a 
friend not long before he breathed his last in Venice. 
"Drive on," said Christmas Evans, the great Welsh 
preacher, with his latest breath. The chariot had 
come, Thomas Jones, another Welsh poet-preacher, 



154 LIFE'S EVENTIDE 

murmured, as he lay dying, "My little rill draws 
near the sea." "Farewell sin, farewell death I" said 
the eloquent and saintly Robert Newton, as the ever- 
lasting doors rolled back to give him entrance into 
heaven. 

Such are a few notable examples of those who car- 
ried with them through life's twilight, yea, to the 
very hour of sunset, the splendor of the dawn. They 
retained the old, unconquerable hope which refuses 
to acquiesce in the visible ruin of death, and their swan- 
song might have been that of Mrs. Barbauld, which 
Wordsworth loved so well: 

Life! we've been long together, 

Through pleasant and through cloudy weather; 

'Tis hard to part when friends are dear — 

Perhaps 'twill cost a sigh, a tear; 

Then steal away, give little warning, 

Choose thine own time; 

Say not "Good-night," but in some brighter clime 
Bid me "Good-morning." 



IX. THE HEAVENLY LIFE 

Home of the blest, where joy for ever flows, 

From fountains pulsing in unsullied light; 
Land where the weary toiler finds repose, 

And they are crowned who battled for the right; 
Where yearning souls achieve each fond desire, 

And age stands radiant in eternal youth; 
And doubt and fear and wild unrest expire, 

And knowledge is expressed in perfect truth. 
Oh for the gift of wings with which to soar, 
And share thy pure delights for evermore. 

R. P. D. 

Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, 
which, according to His abundant mercy, hath begotten us 
again unto a lively hope, by the resurrection of Jesus Christ 
from the dead, to an inheritance incorruptible, undefiled, and 
that fadeth not away. St. Peter. 

WE have to do with another world than this, 
a world invisible it is true, but as really 
existing as the stars which the sunlight hides. Our 
little life is enveloped by this spiritual world. Behind 
the appearances of earth, beyond the waste and decay 
of these frail bodies, that diviner world stands for 
ever in unclouded splendor. This unseen sphere is 
a grand reality. It is literally the only reality, the 
sphere in which we live as compared with it being 
only what the apostle terms "a show" — mere sound 

i55 



156 LIFE'S EVENTIDE 

and smoke, though for too many, sound drowning 
the music and smoke hiding the splendor of the 
diviner world. 

Our relation to this unseen world rests on that 
in our nature which is spiritual and immortal, and 
which death will only release from its prison-house 
of clay. This fact comprises the great mystery of 
man, and it is in it that religion roots itself. It is 
a fact older than revelation and universal in its 
reach and power; it is indeed an intuitive birthright 
of our being. We feel it, though we cannot prove 
it as meaner things are proved. Yet, though we 
cannot prove the reality of the life to come, we are 
distinctly conscious of aspirations and faculties which 
respond to it. We know that while we are endowed 
with powers of sense, and understanding, and action, 
by which we communicate with the present world, 
we also possess affections and aspirations, a faith, 
a hope, and a wonder, which bear us beyond the 
earthly and the finite, and link us with the heavenly 
and the infinite. 

We know not what we shall be, but are sure, 
The spark once kindled by th' eternal breath 

Goes not quite out, but somewhere doth endure 
In that strange life we blindly christen death. 

No conclusions of scientific materialism or cold 
processes of merciless logic can banish from the 
Christian mind the conviction that there is some- 



THE HEAVENLY LIFE 157 

where in the vast universe of God, a sphere, a blessed 
home, a "Father's house," where, in purity and love, 

They live whom we call dead. 

It is a sphere where the glorified spirit, released 
from its tenement of clay and clothed with celestial 
beauty, enters into fullness of joy and into the experi- 
ence of pleasures which are for evermore. 

That the elements of this joy are spiritual presents 
no difficulty to the devout mind, since we feel that, 
despite our intimate association with a material body 
in this earthly life, the soul, or spirit, originally God- 
breathed, is by far the nobler part of us, and that 
its happiness in an environment suited to its nature 
may well be unfading and eternal. 

Joy for the Intellect 

Passing now to the consideration of some of the 
salient characteristics of the joy of heaven, we note 
that it will include, firstly, fullness of joy in the 
attainment of true knowledge and perpetuity of 
joy in the ceaseless progress of the mind after 
knowledge. 

One of the very finest of our powers is that 
which fits us for the acquisition of knowledge. 
And heaven, we are assured, will prove an ever- 
lasting field for the intellect. Many of us look 



158 LIFE'S EVENTIDE 

forward to it with delight as a sphere where we 
shall lay our unanswered questions before God. 
"Death," says Tennyson, "keeps the keys of all the 
creeds"; and the beautiful cry of Charles Kingsley 
finds its echo in numberless hearts, "O lovely death, 
when wilt thou come and tell me all I want to 
know?" While we cannot know all things in that 
diviner world, that which we do know we shall 
know correctly and without error. Our mental 
processes will be clear and vivid. There will be 
unbroken serenity of vision. To refer to the Pauline 
conception, the immature childhood of the mind will 
be exchanged for the maturity of manhood. "That 
which is in part" will be "done away." We shall 
no longer "see through a glass darkly," but "face 
to face." We shall "know even as also we are 
known." A swift, divine intuition will largely 
transcend the slow and uncertain processes of thought. 
Here we see "through a glass darkly" ; truth itself 
is mysterious, providence is obscure, God is very 
little known! We stumble as in a dim twilight. But 
there we shall see all things in a clearer light, and 
with a finer intelligence. Here our minds are like 
fountains sealed; but who can calculate their power 
and fullness when the environment of our mortality 
is removed, and the stream of intellect rolls forth 
to flow unfettered and rejoicing in the light of 
heaven ? 



THE HEAVENLY LIFE 159 

Some one said to a famous mathematician, "What 
are you going to do when you enter the other 
life?" His reply was, "There are enough mathe- 
matical problems connected with the arc of a circle 
to keep me busy and happy for at least a thousand 
years." How varied will be the themes on which 
we shall dilate in that diviner world, and in which 
we shall rejoice ! Creation will spread before us 
its illimitable glory. Redemption will unfold splen- 
dors and relations now undreamed of. Myriads of 
bright intelligences will inform and inspire us by 
their fellowship. And lest, with heaven for its study 
and eternity for the sphere of its research, the in- 
quiring and advancing spirit should imagine that 
a period might arrive in the viewless centuries 
when it might fold its wings in disappointment, 
because there was nothing more to be attempted or 
acquired — God fronts it with Himself. Here it may 
inquire for evermore. His attributes, His counsels, 
His purposes, His character, will for ever discover 
deeper depths of beauty and of harmony through the 
eternal years ; so that, when myriads of ages have 
rolled away, should some mighty seraph cry to the 
advancing spirit, "Canst thou by searching find out 
God?" the wondering and adoring spirit will reply, 
"End there is none to the majesty of God. Lo! also, 
there is no beginning." 



i6o LIFE'S EVENTIDE 

The Bliss of Purity 

Another element in the happiness of heaven is full- 
ness of joy in the attainment of purity and perpetuity 
of joy in its maintenance without stain. 

The human soul has no finer longing than the 
longing for purity, or complete deliverance from 
personal sin and the power of evil, whether from 
within or from without. Perfect purity will mean 
the complete balance of all our powers, their ineffable 
repose under the smile of God. And what is the 
Christian life but one solemn earnest cry for this? 
We long to be free from every tendency toward evil ; 
filled with the eternal light and love; transfigured, 
noble, unsullied, divine. The angel within us longs 
to cast from its immortal arms the last degrading 
fetter, pants to shake from its unfolding pinions the 
last debasing stain, that it may rise into eternal purity. 
We feel that we shall be perfectly happy if we can only 
be perfectly pure. We watch for this more than they 
that watch for the morning. 

And the Word of God assures us that on our 
spirits, if we be faithful, this perfect day shall dawn. 
Heaven is called "the Holy City." It is said of its 
inhabitants that they are "without fault before the 
throne of God." The assurance is given that, "there 
shall in no wise enter into it anything that defileth, 
neither whatsoever worketh abomination or maketh 



THE HEAVENLY LIFE 161 

a lie." Exemption from every kind of evil is assured. 
Nothing can suggest to "the saints in light" a doubt 
of others, or a fear of themselves. They will be 
pure — pure for ever! The mind will not droop. 
The heart will not waver. Each breath will be 
praise, each feeling love, each act obedience. "Oh 
that we had wings like a dove, then would we flee 
away and be at rest !" 



Perfect Fellowships 

Another element in the bliss of heaven will be full- 
ness of joy in communion with all the great and pure, 
and perpetuity of joy in the unbroken character of that 
communion. 

We are formed for society. Beautiful are the 
touches of human sympathy. Sweet is the voice 
of a friend. Lovely is the union of kindred souls. 
The heart must find its resting-place, and the strong 
tide of human affection and desire must find its 
channel. Hence the fellowships in which human 
souls are bound together, by bonds so strong and 
tender that they are often in themselves a prophecy 
of eternity. "Some one has written," says Robert 
Louis Stevenson, "that love makes people believe in 
immortality, because there seems not to be room 
enough in this life for so great a tenderness." Be- 
cause this is true, and everything pure and true is 
ii 



162 LIFE'S EVENTIDE 

willed of God and destined to be perfected and 
eternalized, our human affections will lose in death 
only their imperfection and their earthliness. Love 
is the life and soul of heaven, and it "never faileth," 
but abideth for ever. 

The lines of Mrs. Hemans on "The Graves of the 
Household" find an echo in every heart: 

Thus parted, thus they rest, who played 

Beneath the same green tree, 
Whose voices mingled as they prayed 

Around one parent knee; 
They who with smiles lit up the hall, 

And cheered with songs the hearth: 
Alas for life, if life were all, 

And nought beyond, O earth! 

But there is something beyond, because love never 
faileth, and God is love. The hands we grasped once, 
and for whose vanished touch we wept in agony, 
we shall grasp again, and that in an eternal union. 
The voices which ever thrilled us when they spake, 
and whose silencing brought with it a bitterness as 
of death, we shall hear again, only freed from every 
note of sorrow and resonant with praise. The eyes 
which gazed on us in tenderest affection will gaze 
on us again, only filled with holy light and without 
one quivering tear. And we shall know our loved 
ones. We shall not be more ignorant there than 
we are here. We shall tell them how their memory 



THE HEAVENLY LIFE 163 

haunted us for blessing, and how we reaped the 
harvest of their influence and their prayers. In the 
lines of an American poet, sung by many a tearful 
voice when the war between the North and South 
was raging: 

There is a Future, oh, thank God ! 

Of life this is so small a part! 
'Tis dust to dust beneath the sod, 

But There — up There — 'tis heart to heart I 

Yonder, also, there are other lovely fellowships 
than those we have known in our earthly life, for 
there we shall be bound by new and holy ties to "the 
whole family in earth and heaven." Patriarchs and 
prophets, martyrs and confessors, missionaries and 
philanthropists, ministers and teachers, all the lovely 
and the beautiful earth has ever known, will greet 
us there. There also we shall commune with celestial 
spirits, with angels who are the "ardors of heaven," 
with the purest and grandest intelligences in the 
universe, and, above and beyond all, with the sacred 
Trinity itself. And this communion will last for 
ever. No cry of death will be hard in that land. 
No funeral cortege will darken the streets of that 
city. No sepulcher will gleam amid those ever- 
lasting hills. There will be "no more death." It is 
"swallowed up in victory." 



i6 4 LIFE'S EVENTIDE 

Service in Heaven 

Another feature in the life of heaven is fullness of 
joy in the blessedness of service and perpetuity 
of joy in the unwearied and eternal character of 
that service. 

It is interesting to note how we shape a heaven 
after our own desire. "My chief conception of 
heaven," said Robert Hall to Wilberforce, "is rest." 
"Mine," replied Wilberforce, "is love." A minister 
of later date, who had spent his life in toiling among 
the poor, said, "My chief idea of heaven is service. 
I rejoice in the words, 'His servants shall serve Him/ " 
"Quiet to quick bosoms is a hell," says one of our 
ardent poets, and a heaven without occupation would 
offer to many no sufficing joy. There could be no 
happiness, even in heaven, if the life there were one 
of mere quiescence. But we read of the glorified that 
"they serve God day and night in His temple." It is 
never said of those in heaven that they rest from their 
work, but only from their labor — from that which is 
irksome and oppressive. 

Pleasure has been well defined as "the reflex of 
spontaneous and unimpeded energy." When any 
active power exerts itself without pressure, and with- 
out hindrance, the result is joy. Thus the rest of 
heaven is not the rest of inaction, but the musical 
repose of finely balanced faculties. It is rest in the 



THE HEAVENLY LIFE 165 

rapture of congenial employment, rest in the flow of 
joyful strength. The glorified rest from their labors, 
yet their life is still 

A life that bears immortal fruit 

In such great offices as suit 

The full-grown energies of heaven. 

Yonder, as here, there will be sacred duties to ful- 
fill, works of charity, instruction, and inspiration, 
which it will be our delight to render. The recog- 
nition of the fact of service in heaven goes far to 
explain the wealth of undeveloped faculty which con- 
fronts us in the present world, and to reconcile us to 
what otherwise would be the baffling mystery of gifted 
souls cut off in their youth, or in their prime, and 
bearing splendid possibilities with them into the 
silent grave. 

In this rough-and-ready world there are few who 
find an occupation equal to their powers, while many 
are set to tasks which are utterly uncongenial. A 
great gulf intervenes between what they are and 
what they have the capacity to be. The fountain 
has been choked, the blossom blighted, the beauty 
has not come to birth, the capacities of the 
soul are fulfilled. But all this hidden and unde- 
veloped faculty will find ample scope in the activities 
of heaven. There, with every power called into exer- 
cise, "they shall serve Him"; serve Him in a degree 



i66 LIFE'S EVENTIDE 

never known before. This cheerful faith is well ex- 
pressed by Matthew Arnold : 

And though we wear out life, alas ! 

Distracted as a homeless wind, 
In beating where we must not pass, 

In seeking what we shall not find; 

Yet we shall one day gain, life past, 
Clear prospect o'er our being's whole; 

Shall see ourselves, and learn at last 
Our true affinities of soul. 



Who of us can predict the exceeding weight of glory 
comprehended in the everlasting development of the 
soul under conditions and in an environment favor- 
able to its finest growth? Truly "it doth not yet 
appear what we shall be." 



The Beatific Vision 

We now approach, not without trembling awe, 
the crowning privilege of heaven, which is fullness 
of joy in the unveiled splendor of God, and per- 
petuity of joy in the eternal progression of the 
soul toward that ineffable splendor. It is written, 
"they shall see His face." And it is written again, 
"they shall be like Him, for they shall see Him as 
He is." 

The soul of man was made for God, and can 
find its final and complete beatitude only in Him. 



THE HEAVENLY LIFE 167 

To be consciously near God is the greatest joy of 
earth, to see Him face to face is the crowning joy 
of heaven. 

Here all ideals of beauty and of goodness cul- 
minate. Here is the loveliness which prompts the 
tribute: "Whom have I in heaven but Thee?" 
This is the "marvelous beauty" of which Plato 
writes, "eternal, uncreated, imperishable beauty, 
beauty free from increase or diminution." This is 
the beauty toward which he says the aspiring soul 
should rise "ascending to all fair forms, and from 
fair forms to fair practices, and from fair practices 
to fair thoughts, until from these it arrives at the 
idea of the absolute beauty" — which is the living 
God. 

"They shall see His face," is the word spoken 
concerning those who stand on the "luminous side 
of death." "Every film removed, every intervening 
veil of sense and sin withdrawn, every perceptive 
power heightened to the uttermost, they no longer 
'see through a glass darkly, but face to face/ " 

And the vision of this ineffable loveliness is not 
only entrancing, but transforming. They "shall be 
like Him, for they shall see Him as He is." They 
shall be "changed into the same image from glory 
to glory." Beauty, in its purest forms, always 
elevates the human spirit. We have seen faces 
transfigured in the vision of snow-clad Alps. A 



168 LIFE'S EVENTIDE 

sainted mother has often drawn her children upward 
until they have become one with her moral beauty 
and goodness. How much mightier, in a perfectly 
congenial sphere, the attraction of the manifested 
divine ideal and model of all beauty and goodness! 
Gazing on the unveiled Deity, the glorified in 
heaven grow into the beauty on which they 
gaze. They are transformed by the ceaseless 
attraction of that unfading loveliness. Turning their 
whole souls upon God, they are transfigured and 
glorified, while at the same time they are divinely 
strengthened and upborne to bear the amazing 
splendor and yet live. They catch the radiance of 
His unshaded essence, and become "like Him," because 
they "see Him as He is." They are not, as Oriental 
philosophy teaches, absorbed into God, as sparks in 
the sun or as drops in the ocean; but they maintain 
their identity as "stars in a sunlit heaven," "one star 
differing from another star in glory." He is whose 
splendor they might be in danger of losing them- 
selves, returns them to themselves. Their individual 
life is maintained inviolate. They stand serene 
and glorious in their unimpaired identity, and can 
for ever cry with rapturous awe — "O God, Thou 
art my God." 

How the soul may be expanded and beautified 
as the result of the Beatific Vision may be known 
in some measure from the fact that St. John mis- 



THE HEAVENLY LIFE 169 

took the angel who revealed to him certain celestial 
things in the Apocalypse for the Lord of Glory, and 
was only stayed from an act of worship by the words, 
"See thou do it not: for I am thy fellow servant, and 
of thy brethren the prophets." 

Such are some of the glories which await the re- 
deemed in the celestial world, glories which, if our 
faith were stronger, would invest old age with a finer 
significance and empower us for triumph over the 
stern transition of death. 

Ancient story tells of one, Cleombrotus, who, after 
reading the discourses of Plato on the immortality of 
the soul, was so entranced by the revelation that he 
cast himself headlong from a cliff, that from its shat- 
tered cage his spirit might escape to God. How much 
more firmly based is the hope we cherish and through 
which we may snatch victory from the boasting 
grave ! 

Let us then, with hopeful hearts and onward- 
looking faith — 

Ascend the Mount of Blessing, whence, if thou 
Look higher, then — perchance — thou mayest — beyond 
A hundred ever-rising mountain lines, 
And past the range of Night and Shadow — see 
The high-heaven dawn of more than mortal day 
Strike on the Mount of Vision. 



X. PREPARATION 

Build thee more stately mansions, O my soul, 

As the swift seasons roll ! 

Leave thy low-vaulted past ! 

Let each new temple, nobler than the last, 

Thy being encompass with a dome more vast, 

Till thou at length art free, 

Leaving thine outgrown shell by time's unresting sea ! 

Oliver Wendell Holmes. 

There is an end of mortal life. Then we gather up the 
things we have treasured in this world; they are added to our 
soul, and we carry them out of the world with us. Then no 
man will ever be sorry that in youth he bowed his head in 
prayer — that he clasped hands in the instant of his resolution 
and swore that he would reverence the dreams of his youth, 
and keep undefiled his conscience and his heart, and honor 
his God with a great life. — Theodore Parker. 

/np^HE consideration of the eternal sanctities with 

1 which we dealt in our last chapter will surely 

press home upon us the statement of the apostle, 

"And every man that hath this hope in him purifieth 

himself even as He is pure." This comment is all 

the more pertinent and forceful in the case of those 

who by reason of declining years are rapidly nearing 

the great hereafter. 

It is difficult to conceive anything more mournful 

than a godless old age. It is piteous to behold a 

poor, unhappy man, sporting only with shadows, 

170 



PREPARATION 171 

when eternal realities are so near — still busy, like 
a foolish child, building his sand castles on the shore 
when the rising tide is fast approaching to sweep 
them all away. 

As life wears on, the devout and meditative spirit 
becomes more deeply conscious that there are but 
two abiding realities in the universe — God and itself. 
All else is but a fleeting show, which cannot come 
into intimate contact with the spirit, and which will 
vanish while the spirit still endures and craves its 
appropriate nourishment. 

The wise man, therefore, as the years steal on, sets 
himself to the necessary task of breaking away from 
perishing interests, shaking himself free from intrud- 
ing activities, and securing emancipation from earthly 
entanglements, that he may stand face to face with 
God and with eternity. As human companionships 
fall off through change or death, he seeks a closer 
fellowship with God. As earthly cables slip and 
mundane interests recede, he anchors more securely 
within the veil. 

Dr. Chalmers said, "It is a favorite speculation 
of mine that if spared to sixty years of age we then 
enter on the seventh decade of human life, and that 
this should be turned into the Sabbath of our 
earthly pilgrimage and spent sabbatically and as 
if on the shores of an eternal world." Who can 
deny the wisdom and the truth of this reflection? 



172 LIFE'S EVENTIDE 

Old age should live in the region of unclouded 
aspiration, of pure desire, of spiritual discernment, 
of quiet trust, and of those motives and inspirations 
borrowed from eternity which enrich the poverty 
of time. The period has gone by when we can 
trifle with life and character, when one slip into 
dishonest practice, or unreasoning hate, or sensual 
mire, is of no fatal consequence. Now or never 
we must resist hardness and cupidity, selfishness 
and greed, and be sure that no sin is allowed to 
lurk in the depths of the spirit. We must "redeem 
the time." We must gather up its fragments that 
nothing be lost. We must esteem its every hour 
as a precious opportunity and use it with a miser's 
care. We cannot afford at this stage of our 
existence to make light of our days. They are 
too few. For us every sand in Time's hour-glass is 
golden. Not without reason did Dr. Johnson put 
the motto on his watch, "The night cometh." With 
a meaning differing from that which the Greek 
poet intended, who merely alluded to the pursuit 
of pleasure, John Wesley, toward the close of 
life, as he was helped' by friendly hands along the 
street, or into the pulpit, would quote with a sweet 
smile the line from Anacreon, 

Tis time to live if I grow old. 

So with all who face the sunset it is time to live — 



PREPARATION 173 

time to live for God and for eternity, to lay up treasure 
in heaven, to gather up the last fragments of oppor- 
tunity for service, to acquire the virtues and disposi- 
tions which secure meetness for the inheritance of the 
saints in light. 

A subtle thinker has said, in lines which rebuke 
our faithlessness — 

Not till the fire is dying in the grate 
Look we for any kinship with the stars. 

Well, for us the fire is dying in the grate, and we 
must raise wistful eyes toward the spaces on which 
no bounds can be set, and toward the "many man- 
sions" of our Father's house. We must not, like 
Belshazzar, indulge in idle merriment with the Persian 
at the gate, or, like Damocles, feast carelessly under 
the shadow of the sword. 

With us the time is short, the vast eternity is 
near, and we must seek preparation for the eternal 
sanctities. 

Methods of Preparation 

Among the methods of preparation one of the most 
helpful is found in prayerful meditation on divine and 
eternal things. Sir Thomas Browne says, with a kind 
of quaint magnificence, "Have a glimpse of incom- 
prehensibles and thoughts of things which thoughts 
but tenderly touch. Lodge immaterials in thy head; 



174 LIFE'S EVENTIDE 

ascend into invisibles; fill thy spirit with spirituals, 
with the mysteries of faith, the magnalities of religion, 
and thy life with the honor of God; without which, 
though giants in wealth and dignity, we are but dwarfs 
and pigmies." 

Water will not rise above its own level, and the 
soul will not rise above the level of its beliefs and 
hopes and aspirations. The changeless realities of 
faith draw our souls from an earthly and sensual life 
into harmony with the will and kingdom of God. 
They have the power to uplift and ennoble us. They 
raise us to the level of their own majesty, and sinew 
us with their own eternity. They 

Uphold us, cherish, and have power to make 
Our noisy years seem moments in the being 
Of the eternal silence. 

You can scarcely get true grandeur into life if 
you sever it from God and eternity. George Mere- 
dith has said that if we let romance go we exchange 
the sky for the ceiling. This is far more true of 
religion. An oak cannot reach its measure of 
strength and majesty in a vase. It needs the free 
winds and the illimitable sky. Neither can the 
human soul reach its full stature if shut out from 
the breath of heaven, the thought of God, and the 
consideration of a future life. Where these sublime 
realities are felt and cherished men attain a fuller 



PREPARATION 175 

stature and a grander being. They have higher aims, 
larger horizons, more commanding points of view, 
and a loftier conception of life and destiny. They 
recognize their life to be a pilgrimage, but a pilgrim- 
age with a definite goal — the city of angels and God. 
They know that the few and fleeting years of time 
are but a halt at the gate of eternity; and that true 
wisdom consists in practically understanding the in- 
effaceable distinction which exists between that which 
perishes and that which lasts for ever. This knowl- 
edge, and the seriousness and dignity with which it 
invests the character of those who cherish it, is the 
first great requisite of preparedness for fellowship 
with the immortals. 

The sanctities of worship form another important 
element in the preparation for a diviner world. They 
greatly err who lightly esteem the advantages of 
public worship. The sympathy of numbers is a 
mystic and powerful thing. Deep of feeling and 
conviction call unto deep. Echoes roll from soul to 
soul. Our great beliefs assume a finer consistency 
and certainty when we find they are shared by others, 
many of whom we regard as purer and nobler than 
ourselves. Then, again, what a power of stirring the 
imagination, and elevating the soul, is contained in 
the lessons, the liturgies, and the hymns of the 
sanctuary! From these things we receive an educa- 
tion of the significance of which we are well nigh 



176 LIFE'S EVENTIDE 

as unconscious as the night of its stars; but blot 
them out and it were night indeed — a voiceless 
gulf of unillumined gloom. Reverence, faith, and 
aspiration are the springs of noble and fruitful living. 
The Sabbath and its worship stand for our highest 
life. That imperfection which is the characteristic of 
all earthly things may cleave to them, but, neverthe- 
less, they are the prelude to the nobler worship of 
the skies. 

A gradual disengagement of the spirit from worldly 
interests in declining years is another important 
element in preparation for eternity. It has been 
truly said that day by day in our present fevered 
civilization, secular aims palpably gain in power, 
extent, and interest. How earnest are the men of 
our time in the pursuit of things which perish in the 
using! How fierce and keen are the conflicts of 
business life! At deep midnight the roar of our 
great cities is scarcely stilled, and the surging of the 
multitudes by day makes the individual heart quail. 
Never was the world so intensely worldly as it is 
today. And while secular aims deepen in interest 
and intensity, spiritual realities recede, and we are 
in great danger of making a nothing of eternity, and 
an eternity of nothing. In these strenuous days we 
need to impose a Sabbath on our spirits, and to seek 
the grace which brings heaven near. We need to 
borrow the riches of eternity for the ennobling of the 



PREPARATION 177 

poverty of time. A deeper conviction needs to be 
inspired within us of the truth that — 

He builds too low who builds beneath the skies. 

Frequent, specific, secret prayer is another essential 
requisite for victory over the world, and fitness for 
the sanctities of heaven. They who "wait upon the 
Lord renew their strength, they mount up on wings 
as eagles." The blue of heaven enfolds them, and 
the world is far below. It assumes its relative 
insignificance as compared with infinity and eternity. 
Furthermore, prayer is power, and in the daily battle 
power is our chiefest need. By fellowship with God 
we are lifted up and strengthened. Only through 
His inbreathed power, dwelling in us as a soul within 
our soul, can we overcome the sins which most easily 
beset us, and master the adverse forces which are 
ever seeking to drag us earthward. 

The excitements and exhaustion of modern life 
deepen the necessity for secret prayer. Without the 
succor and the help it brings we cannot attain to 
depth, and elevation, and tranquillity of soul. We 
are lifted from our feet and borne away by the hurry- 
ing tide. But resting in God we stand firm, and are 
strong for service or for sorrow, for duty or for death. 

Man's wisdom is to seek 

His strength in God alone; 
And even an angel would be weak 
Who trusted in his own. 
12 



178 LIFE'S EVENTIDE 

Fixed and Magnificent Resolve 

While no thoughtful mind will underestimate the 
methods of preparation for our true destiny which 
we have here indicated, we are yet convinced that, 
after all, our greatest need with regard to this solemn 
issue is the presence and the exercise of fixed and 
magnificent resolve. No human life should drift like 
a log on the wave, carried hither and thither by 
every wind or tide. It should have a definite aim, 
a fixed and steadfast purpose to which all else should 
be subservient. Every rational being should be able 
to give an account to himself of what he is living 
for, of what goal he would fain reach. His life should 
be subordinate to reason, and his conduct in harmony 
with his destiny. Now since our souls are the breath 
of God, and must return to God after the dust they 
wear about them returns to its dust, it follows that 
our relations to God and to eternity must be the 
supreme relations of our life, and the cultivation of 
these relations by prayer and trust, and holy 
wrestling with evil, the one sublime end of our 
human existence. Other objects may engage our 
attention, but we know that in comparison with 
these they are but trifles. Other subjects may 
enchain our thought, but we feel that when they 
touch these mighty issues they dissolve like snow- 
flakes when they touch the boundless sea. It 



PREPARATION 179 

behooves us, then, if we be indeed rational creatures, 
to give to these supreme objects the attention which 
is their due. We must exclaim with St. Paul: 
"One thing I do, forgetting the things which are 
behind, and stretching forward to the things which 
are before, I press on toward the goal unto the prize 
of the high calling of God in Christ Jesus." This 
passage illustrates for us the value of life in the light 
of the eternal world, and indicates the concentra- 
tion of purpose which eternal realities should inspire. 
A race is to be run, and a prize obtained worthy 
of the athlete's finest effort. To accomplish the end 
before him he must lay aside every weight, strain 
every nerve. Nothing must draw his attention from 
the object in view. Even the rapt spectators in the 
amphitheater must appear but as a cloud, and their 
applause the noise of idle thunder, as he presses 
toward the goal. He is possessed only by one 
thought. All his energies are strained in one direc- 
tion. He forgets the things which are behind. They 
fall away from him like a garment which might 
hinder his speed. The prize — Life! — Life! — Eternal 
Life! So should we run that we may obtain. "One 
thing I do." There must be the concentrated pur- 
pose. A heart that desires only one object, a mind 
that thinks of nothing, eyes that see nothing, hands 
that break down and fling aside everything that 
would hinder, feet which trample down and stride 



180 LIFE'S EVENTIDE 

over every barrier which intervenes; no time, or 
thought, or strength to be put forth in any other 
direction until the goal is won and the prize is 
gained. 

The end of our being is to educate, bring out, 
and perfect the divine principles of our nature. We 
are upheld in life for this great end; and since there 
must be some established harmony between character 
and environment, on this our very heaven depends. 
We hope to enter heaven, but there must be such 
qualities and tendencies existent in us as prepare 
us for its occupations and its fellowships. Our 
heaven is here round about us, here within us, a 
present heaven in the imitation of Christ, in the 
practice of righteousness, in the enthronement of 
God in our affections, in the thirst after purity. 
Our only reasonable hope of heaven is based on 
spiritual experiences and attainments already begun 
in this world and continuable in the next. To 
anticipate a higher and purer existence in some 
future life while we neglect our souls in the present 
life is a delusion not less condemned by reason 
than by revelation. Why should we dream of a 
heaven which we may not enter here and now? If 
our present existence is not esteemed as sacred, how 
can we look for sacredness in any other? To those 
who waste the present life, frivolizing it by in- 
difference, and spending its golden hours in the 



PREPARATION 181 

pursuit of vanity, how can a future life present any- 
thing worthy or magnificent? Heaven must begin 
here. Here the seed must be sown which is to expand 
for ever. Here and now we must cast anchor within 
the veil. Eternity throbs in every moment of time, 
and a single Christian moment is worth more than a 
whole life given up to vanity. 

Pilgrims of the morning, we must not be borne 
away by the tide of this world. Though in it, we 
must still be above it, keeping it where God has 
placed it, beneath our feet. We must withdraw from 
its glare and fever and move beneath those starry 
and fathomless deeps where the Eternal Father lives 
and reigns. The reasons which urge us to a whole- 
hearted consecration to God and virtue grow stronger 
every day we live. Every hour is impairing the 
luster and the value of things around us, while every 
hour is adding to the nearness and importance of 
eternal things. "It is high time to awake out of 
sleep, for now is our salvation nearer than when 
we believed." We are near eternity. The veil which 
separates us from it is extremely thin, and may be 
rent at any moment. In the throb of a pulse, in the 
flash of a thought, in the twinkling of an eye, we may 
breathe its air, hear its sounds, gaze upon its sights, 
and be ushered into the presence of its mighty and 
strange spirits. 

Let us then turn our thought, our prayer, our 



182 LIFE'S EVENTIDE 

heart to God, that our prosperity may not be that 
of the foolish in their momentary way, but that of 
the wise which abideth for ever. Let us walk with 
the Divine Prophet, and He will make us wise. 
Let us walk with the Divine Priest, and He will 
cleanse us from our sins and make us holy. Let 
us walk with the Divine King, and He will teach 
us self-government and make us greater than those 
who triumph over cities. "The world passeth away, 
and the lust thereof; but he that doeth the will 
of God abideth for ever." He may be dead, yet shall 
he live. Death is his great birthday. It is his 
last day in prison and the first of his true liberty. 
It opens for him the door of this earthly cage, that 
he may pass into the land of everlasting light and 
everlasting song. 

O let us change our dust for gold, 

From death to glory flee; 
Renounce our shadows, and lay hold 

On Immortality. 

Thus will come the end, when life and its labors 
are over, and when in pathetic loneliness we falter 
back to God. How solemn the hour in which we 
shall be called to answer at the bar of the Eternal 
for the precious gift of human life — its powers, its 
opportunities, its influence ! Standing there, before 
God, how imperfect will appear all we have acquired 
for ourselves in the way of sanctity, all we have 



PREPARATION 183 

achieved for others in the way of service! How 
much there will be to engender humility and to 
inspire regret — our vain desires, our poor ambitions, 
our eager chase of things which perish in the using, 
our inordinate self-love, our childish petulance, our 
unreasoning pride, our glaring inconsistencies, our 
impotent resolves, our halting and imperfect con- 
secration ! Then the deep of God's atoning mercy 
in Christ will speak to the deep of our great 
necessity, and a perfect repentance will present 
itself as our only virtue. 

"You are going to receive your reward," said a 
friend to a dying Christian, whose life had been 
devoted to the noblest ends. "Nay," was the reply. 
"I am going to receive mercy." This, with regard 
to most of us, will be all we can ask, all for which 
we can reasonably hope — to receive mercy. And in 
this He will not fail us of whom it is written "He 
delighteth in mercy." That mercy will be our only 
trust, like for the sins and failures of the past and for 
that process of restoration still awaiting us through 
which our souls will be purified and prepared for the 
ineffable splendor of the beatific vision. 

With gentle swiftness lead us on, 

Dear God ! to see Thy face ; 
And meanwhile in our narrow hearts, 

O make Thyself more space! 



XI. CERTITUDE IN RELIGION 

Our souls go too much out of self 

Into ways dark and dim: 
Tis rather God who seeks for us, 

Than we who seek for Him. 

But God is never so far off 

As even to be near; 
He is within: our spirit is 

The home He holds most dear. 

Faber. 

The Spirit of God lies all about the spirit of man like a 
might}' sea, ready to rush in at the smallest chink in the 
walls that shut Him out from His own. — George Macdonald. 

WE have dealt largely in these pages with the 
sanctities and the consolations of religion, 
and it is difficult to conceive of a human soul, 
especially as age creeps on, which is not interested 
in these sanctities. We can scarcely understand 
how a thoughtful spirit can exist which does not 
long for the blessedness of acquaintance with God, 
and for the peace and security which that acquaint- 
ance involves. God is our home, and without Him 
we are orphaned and homeless. There is profound 
truth in the utterance which reads, "Without God 

and without hope in the world." Without God — His 

184 



CERTITUDE IN RELIGION 185 

fellowship, His favor — the world is but a wilderness, 
and our human life an insoluble and unprofitable 
problem. 

The great question, then, is as to whether this favor 
and this fellowship are really attainable. In other 
words, is there such a thing possible as absolute certi- 
tude in religious life and experience? 

We are well aware that there is a school of thinkers 
who declare that the knowledge of God and affiance 
in Him are things impossible. They tell us that 
nothing which is satisfactory or conclusive can be 
known concerning spiritual things. They say that 
between human vision and analysis and the things 
which transcend our vision and analysis a great gulf is 
fixed, a gulf which we cannot by any possibility span. 
According to their teaching the human mind is not 
a dome lighted from above, and open to the infinite, 
but only a polished arch merely capable of reflecting 
that which is beneath. Thus genuine religion is 
impossible, since it moves only in a world of dreams 
and fancies, and not in a world of sober and assured 
realities. 

In reply to these assumptions we say that man's 
capability of knowledge can be apprehended only 
by the recognition of the full scope of his faculties 
with their appointed relations to universal truth. 
Man is triune. He consists of body, soul, and spirit. 
Through the body, linked with the informing mind, 



186 LIFE'S EVENTIDE 

he experiences the fact of ,s<??w£-consciousness. 
Through the soul he experiences the fact of self- 
consciousness. Through the spirit, which is God- 
related and God-breathed, he experiences the fact of 
GW-consciousness. In virtue of this transcendent 
faculty, by which he is chiefly distinguished from 
the mere animal, he has affinity with the world of 
spirits, and with God the infinite Spirit, and may 
apprehend these realities as truly and as constantly, 
though in a different way, as he apprehends the 
reality of visible things. 

They falsify our nature who link us only with the 
dust. All things low do indeed touch us, because 
of our physical inheritance; but all things high meet 
in us also, and thrill us with their celestial might. 
Matter and spirit, earth and heaven, man and God, 
time and eternity, all touch us because we are related 
to them all. The dome of our complex human nature 
is open at the top and lets in upon us the light which 
is transcendent and divine. 

The Divine Approach 

There are two great truths which are as clear as 
daylight, and they are these, that God is and that 
He touches us. The secret of religion is found not 
so much in our ascent toward God as in His descent 
toward us. He "besets us behind and before, and 



CERTITUDE IN RELIGION 187 

lays His hand upon us." He 'Visits us every morn- 
ing, and tries us every moment." What we need in 
relation to Him is that awareness which recognizes 
His approach, and responds to His touch. To all 
who thirst for God, for the living God, He reveals 
Himself as a Friend and a Comforter. This is a 
universal experience, against which all the arguments 
of unbelief are powerless. No incapacity of physical 
science to find God alters the fact that He makes 
His dwelling with the humble and the contrite. 
The seeking and responsive spirit is not left to 
wander in darkness, and to the pure in heart is 
given, as of old, that vision of God which is the crown 
and glory of life. 

It would be strange indeed if man could, by the 
use of his faculties, and through obedience to their 
laws, attain the knowledge of mathematics, or physics, 
or language, or morals, and yet be unable, by the 
use of his highest faculties, to attain religious truth; 
strange, indeed, that no animal should be found 
whose wants are not satisfied, and their desires met, 
while the grandest needs of man are utterly un- 
provided for, and his noblest desires mocked and 
thwarted. 

Not thus, however, has a faithful Creator dealt with 
the creatures of His care. On the contrary, having 
constituted man a being capable of fellowship with 
Himself, a vessel into which He may pour His life, 



188 LIFE'S EVENTIDE 

a mirror which may receive and reflect His splendor, 
a temple in which, by His Spirit, He may take up 
His abode, He seeks to possess, to satisfy, and to 
uplift him. "His delights are with the sons of men." 
He is not content to people dead space with His 
presence, and to leave His fitting temple in the human 
soul unvisited and unblest. He is not content to 
robe the fading lily in more than kingly splendor, and 
abandon that star-like flower of the human spirit 
which may for ever pulsate to His breath. He seeks 
the warm shelter of a loving heart. He stoops from 
His throne in vast eternity to dwell with the con- 
trite and humble spirit. He "seeketh such to 
worship Him." 

He calls to men as the great sea calls to the vexed 
and turbid streams, "Come to me, and be at rest! 
Come to me, and I will make you clean and sweet 
again, and you shall flow and sparkle beneath the 
blue, unfathomable sky!" He calls to men as 
the sun calls to the dark and somber clouds, "Come 
to me, and I will flood you with brightness and 
cause you to hover like a glory in the golden West!" 
He calls to men as the father calls to the prodigal, 
"Come to me from the bondage that is agony to 
your soul, and from the husks which mock its 
hunger, and you shall have bread enough and to 
spare !" 

Voltaire said, "If God be not within us, He has 



CERTITUDE IN RELIGION 189 

never existed." We accept the challenge. God is 
present and active in all spirit as in all space, and 
since He finds His deepest joy in the outgoings of 
benevolence, since with Him it is more blessed to 
give than to receive, He grants to men spiritual 
light and spiritual inspiration. This explains the 
reality of that religious sentiment in man to which 
St. Paul appealed in his address to the Athenians 
on Mars' Hill. There is in every man a germinal 
revelation of God. Everywhere he is the offspring 
of God, and God is not far from him, for in God 
he lives and moves and has his being; and every- 
where God seeks by a yet more endearing intimacy 
of touch to take him to Himself in the bliss of a 
conscious fellowship, a fellowship which goes deeper 
than that involved in the ordinary offices of praise 
and prayer. The inner secret of religion is the 
conscious union of the soul with God. And it is in 
this union that we find the real seat of its authority. 
"The kingdom of God is within us," and is not 
dependent for its evidence either on a supposed 
infallible Book, or a presumed infallible Church. 
Both of these may be discredited, but their failure 
as a basis of certitude in religion will not affect 
those who have in their own experience realized the 
fulfillment of the promise, "I will dwell in them, and 
walk in them : and I will be their God, and they shall 
be My people." How, then, may men enter into this 



190 LIFE'S EVENTIDE 

experience? What are the conditions of this divine 
fellowship? How may men know God and com- 
mune with Him as friend with friend ? 



The Presence of Sincere Desire 

The first requisite for divine knowledge and 
fellowship is the presence of sincere desire, such 
desire as that which Moses felt when he cried out, 
"I beseech Thee, show me Thy glory," or as that 
which stirred the heart of Job when, in his loneli- 
ness and sorrow, he exclaimed, "Oh, that I knew 
where I might find Him, that I might come even 
to His seat," or like that of Philip, when he said 
to the Master, "Show us the Father, and it sufficem 
us." Our chief difficulty is not with the atheism 
which denies God, but with the indifference which 
does not seek Him, and with the worldly complacency 
which does not feel its need of Him. There are some 
who do not want God, who do not like to acknowledge 
a supreme will to which they must conform, but 
who want their own will and their own way — who 
seek, indeed, to live independently of God. But there 
is a far larger number who do not wish to be rid 
of God, but who simply ignore Him. In the words 
of the psalmist, "God is not in all their thoughts." 
Sometimes in hours of special blessing, or of special 
sorrow — as when death darkens the home — the 



CERTITUDE IN RELIGION 191 

thought o£ God is flashed in upon them, only, how- 
ever, to be thrust aside as something which does not 
weigh in the outlook on life. It is not wonderful, 
therefore, that in such cases God is not found. 

It behooves us to remember that the religious 
faculty, like every other faculty we possess, may be 
injured and even lost by indifference and non-use. 
It may become atrophied by neglect and through 
want of exercise. It is vital, therefore, to our highest 
interests that it should be kept awake and active. 
We recognize the necessity for the culture of all 
other faculties — why not, then, of the religious 
faculty? We do not expect any other knowledge or 
certainty to come to us without effort and a responsive 
receptivity — why, then, this which is the most vital 
and important of all knowledge and of all certainties? 
The promise is to those who seek Him with all their 
hearts — to those who know what it is to cry, "As the 
heart panteth after the water-brooks, so panteth my 
soul after Thee, O God/' It is not the will of God 
that any soul which He has made should be outlawed. 
On the contrary, He condescends to appear as if He 
hungered for our trust, and was made gladder by our 
love. Though, like a perplexed German thinker, 
whose experience is recorded, we should only be able 
to cry, "O God, if Thou art, reveal Thyself to me," 
in our case, as in his, the eternal love will reveal 
itself and the eternal light break in upon our gloom. 



192 LIFE'S EVENTIDE 

And this altogether apart from the creeds and or- 
dinances of men. In the seeking and responsive soul 
is the Real Presence. The Father is everywhere near 
to His children. He rejoices to make them glad 
within the shelter of His wings. Flying to Him, and 
safely folded under His shadow, they understand the 
mystic yet splendid cry of St. Augustine, "O God, 
most hidden, most manifest." Hidden amid the 
movements of blind, insensate Nature; hidden amid 
the philosophies of men: but manifest to the trusting 
and receptive soul. 



The Recognition of God in Christ 

Another requisite for divine knowledge and 
fellowship is the recognition of God in Christ. We 
desire to see God, but how can we see the invisible 
One; to know God, but how can we know the infinite 
One; to be at peace with God, but how can we be 
at peace with the all-holy One? Here we are met 
by the revelation of God in Christ. In Him the 
invisible One is seen ; in Him the infinite One is 
circumscribed to the conditions of the finite; in Him 
the all-holy One becomes a sacrifice for sin — an 
atonement for sinners. Here we perceive that the 
ladder of the patriarch's dream is not a dream, but 
a glorious reality. There is a ladder which links our 
low earth with the inviolate heavens, and the angels 



CERTITUDE IN RELIGION 193 

of our prayer may ascend, and the angels of our 
blessing may descend, upon the Son of Man. As 
Browning expressed it: 

The acknowledgment of God in Christ 
Accepted by thy reason, solves for thee 
All questions in the earth and out of it. 

The revelation of God in man has been made to 
man, and if we would know God we must simply 
accept Christ's words and build upon them. "Believe 
that I am in the Father, and the Father in Me." 
And once more, "He that hath seen Me hath seen 
the Father." Very God incarnated Himself in the 
Christ who trod our earth. It was the compassion 
of God which streamed from the heart of Christ. 
It was the love of God which spake to men in the 
pitying voice of Christ. It was the mercy of God 
which touched men in the healing hand of Christ. 
Christ was not something apart from God — God 
standing on the side of justice, and Christ on the 
side of mercy. Christ did not come into the world 
to make God love us; it was because God loved us 
that He came. Christ has not somehow softened 
God, and made Him kinder; but He has interpreted 
for us the love with which God has regarded us 
from the beginning. 

Thus the All-Great is the All-Loving too — 
Thus through the thunder comes a human voice, 
Saying, "O heart I made, a heart beats here." 

13 



194 LIFE'S EVENTIDE . 

Our thoughts need no longer wander through 
eternity in search of the living God. Here we can 
clasp by faith the hand of the Infinite. Here we 
can feel the throb of the great heart which keeps 
creation warm. 

Moral Obedience 

Another essential requisite for any sufficing knowl- 
edge of God is moral obedience. If we would really 
know God, and be at peace with Him, we must live 
the life of purity and obedience through which alone 
fellowship with Him is made possible. We must 
seek God in Christ, not by merely reading about 
Christ, but by following Him. Obedience is the 
source of spiritual knowledge. It is true that we 
shall be like Him when we see Him as He is. But 
we must be that we may see, as well as see that we 
may be. It is useless to say that we believe in 
Christ unless we are striving to conform to His image. 
"Unto the upright there ariseth light in darkness." 
That is a fruitful word which reads in the Revised 
Version, "If any man willeth to do His will, he shall 
know of the teaching, whether it be of God, or 
whether I speak from Myself." 

Here we have laid down the great principle that 
it is not the clear intellect which gives the right heart, 
but the right heart which clarifies the intellect; that 
men must love the truth before they will thoroughly 



CERTITUDE IN RELIGION 195 

believe it, and that the gospel receives the assent of 
the understanding only when it brings a passport 
from a rightly disposed will. It is the will which 
keeps the keys of the soul, shutting out or letting 
in whatever it pleases. A conscience clarified by 
virtuous living; moral perceptions made keen and 
clear by the choice of right; inward loyalty to truth; 
the fine, pure temper of sincerity; the habit of 
obedience, — these are, in this realm, the great 
revealers. 

The things of God are not revealed to the brute or 
to the brutish man. The heart can only know that 
which it loves — that with which it has some affinity. 
"Things human," says Pascal, "must be known to 
be loved, things divine must be loved to be known." 
An honest desire to know the truth; a readiness to 
make any sacrifice for the attainment of that knowl- 
edge; swift and unfaltering obedience to the truth as 
far as it is already known — these will bring the light 
when nothing else will bring it. 

Sin has in all ages destroyed evidence by destroying 
the sentiments which make it visible. St. Paul speaks 
of things which are "spiritually discerned." There are 
many things in religion which fade from the grasp 
of reason, because they have first faded from the 
vision and the insight of love. "Blessed are the pure 
in heart," said the Master, "for they shall see God." 
The great cure for doubt in the intellect is holiness in 



196 LIFE'S EVENTIDE 

the heart. Our conscience, our moral perceptions, 
these are the true revealers of God. In proportion 
to their clearness do we discern Him, and in pro- 
portion as they become darkened and obscured, He 
grows dim and vanishes away. The pure in heart 
alone see God. He is hidden and silent to those 
who will not bring heart as well as mind in their 
quest of Him. 

In vain we look, in vain uplift 

Our eyes to heaven, if we are blind; 

We see but what we have the gift 
Of seeing; what we bring we find. 

The pursuit of excellence, obedience to duty, the 
cultivation of holy affections, the hunger and thirst 
for the divine — these create the condition of which 
it is written, "I will dwell in them, and walk in them, 
and I will be their God, and they shall be My 
people." 

Walking in the holy fear of God, purifying our- 
selves even as God is pure, seeking daily a fuller 
knowledge of the divine will that we may hasten 
to obey it, we shall have a sense of God so near and 
so intimate that the sun in the heavens is not more 
real to the scientific observer than God will be to us. 
Nay, the certainty of God to the pure and responsive 
soul is more real than the certainty of the sun in the 
heavens, for the knowledge of the sun in the sky is 
mediate, and therefore imperfect, knowledge ; the 



CERTITUDE IN RELIGION 197 

knowledge of something outside them, and unlike 
them. But the knowledge of God in the soul is 
absolute knowledge, being founded on the similarity 
of the mind knowing and the object known. 

Thus, those who fear God and delight in His 
mercy have a direct consciousness of His being and 
His presence. They grope in no uncertain gloom, 
inquiring if there be a God or not. They take no 
dubious and uncertain flight into the distant spaces 
of the starry universe that they may find Him of 
whose voice the universe is "'the choral echo." They 
forge no chain of logic with its successive links of 
ordered and inexorable sequence, hoping to find God 
at the end of their conclusions. But, withdrawing 
with bowed head and uncovered feet in that inner 
shrine where God dwells in each of us, and where 
the infinite and the finite meet, they raise the grand 
confession, "I believe in God the Father Almighty, 
Maker of heaven and earth." 



Affiance in God 

Yet further, the devout believer not only believes 
in God as the "'Maker of heaven and earth," but 
enters into the glad experience of fellowship and com- 
munion with God. Religion in the soul is not simply 
a feeling after God, neither is it merely the sense of 
absolute dependence on God, but it is an experience of 



198 LIFE'S EVENTIDE 

divine fellowship; the pulse-beat of the infinite life 
in the finite heart. Those who love God and obey 
Him are not disciples merely, but friends, not servants, 
but sons. Having received that witness of acceptance 
and reconciliation which enables them to cry, "Abba, 
Father," they walk with God as dear children, con- 
scious of the succors of His grace and of the warm 
embrace of His love. God communes with them not 
as when hand touches hand, but by the ineffable fel- 
lowship of spirit with spirit, shedding light upon their 
darkness and infusing into their weakness the strength 
of His own Omnipotence. He is the center of their 
rest, the well-spring of their joy, the guardian of their 
life. The planet, no longer wandering in isolation 
and in gloom, has found its center, and blooms and 
sings in its ordered course. The estuary, no longer 
empty and unclean, has received into its bosom the 
fullness of the rejoicing sea. In solitude the soul has 
overflowing company, and in sorrow an abiding joy 
which lies deeper than all tears. The very greatness 
of God is an unspeakable delight: 

For greatness which is infinite makes room 

For all things in its lap to lie; 
We should be crushed by a magnificence 

Short of infinity. 

But what is infinite must be a home, 

A shelter for the meanest life, 
Where it is free to reach its greatest growth 

Far from the touch of strife. 



CERTITUDE IN RELIGION 199 

Such is the experience of those who have made "the 
glad leap of trusting affection into the infinite arms." 
They consciously realize that "in God they live and 
move and have their being," and that He "works in 
them to will and to do of His good pleasure." By a 
certainty above all argument, higher than all logic, 
and more satisfactory than any process of mere 
reasoning, they realize the divine interest in them, the 
divine nearness to them, and the divine succor amid 
the conflicts and sorrows of life. 

And they are well assured that He in whom they 
trust will never leave them nor forsake them. They 
are saved, not in virtue of the strength of their hold 
on Him, but in virtue of the strength of His hold on 
them — as the infant is safe not because it clasps its 
mother's neck so firmly, but because it is upheld in 
its mother's arms and folded to its mother's heart. 
The grasp upon the everlasting strength of those 
who trust in God may be frail at first, but it 
strengthens as they cling. They may hold only 
feebly, but they are held mightily. They may love 
only imperfectly and intermittently, but they are loved 
with a divine and an everlasting love. Feebly, 
brokenly, and tremulously, as age creeps on, they 
may pursue their onward way, but nevertheless their 
deepened experience of the divine tenderness, tested 
through the years, shall inspire St. Paul's triumphant 
utterance: "For I am persuaded that neither death, 



200 LIFE'S EVENTIDE 

nor life, nor angels, nor principalities, nor powers, 
nor things present, nor things to come, nor height, 
nor depth, nor any other creature, shall be able 
to separate us from the love of God which is in 
Christ Jesus our Lord." "O hearts of love," says 
Whittier— 

O hearts of love ! O souls that turn 
Like sunflowers to the pure and best, 
To you the truth is manifest; 

For they the word of Christ discern 
Who lean, like John, upon His breast. 

The world sits at the feet of Christ, 
Unknowing, blind, and unconsoled; 
It yet shall touch His garment's fold 

And feel the heavenly Alchemist 
Transform its very dust to gold. 



ENVOI 

A bruised reed shall He not break, and the smoking flax 
He shall not quench: He shall bring forth judgment unto 
truth. — Isa. xlii. 3. 

Message divine, fraught with a tender spell, 
Which suits our timid trust and weakness well; 
The message of the Judge, who, knowing all, 
Compassionates our frailty and our fall. 

He knows with what equipment we were sent 
Into this tangled maze of dark event; 
What hidden heritage of good or ill, 
Was thrust upon us alien to our will. 

What father's sternness mingled with our blood, 
What mother's yielding grace of womanhood; 
Or what more distant influence on us fell, 
Making for heaven, or quick with seeds of hell. 

And all His knowledge is in pity throned, 
The pity which for all our sins atoned: 
The grace which ever seeks to aid and bless, 
The care which cannot fail in tenderness. 

The trembling reed, which vibrates to His breath, 
He will not trample into dusty death; 
But fill with music passionate and sweet, 
And thus restore it to its purpose meet. 

The spark He kindled cannot perish quite, 
Being native to the Eternal Infinite; 
But fraught with deeping splendors of desire, 
Shall ever toward its primal source aspire. 

R. P. D. 
201 



INDEX 



Abernethy, Dr., his recipe, 28 
Addison, 34 
Age, the beauty of, 124 
Alps, Ruskin's vision of the, 8 
Arnauld's work in old age, 

54 
Arnold, Matthew, 49, 99, 166 
Arnold of Rugby, and his 

pupils, 130 
Augustine, St., 85, 91, 192 
Aurelius, Marcus, 21 
Autumn, the beauty of, 120 

Barbauld, Mrs., 154 
Beatific vision, the, 166 
Beautiful old age, examples 

of, 133 
Beauty in twilight, 5 
— of spirit, 119 
Beethoven, the death of, 152 
Bible, the pre-eminence of 

the, 63 
Biography and history, uses 

of, 65 
Blake, William, 90 
Books of entertainment, 68 
— sacred, 62 

— the companionship of, 60 
Browne, Sir Thomas, 23, 173 
Browning, Robert, 31, 86, 

*53> i93 
— in old age, 141 
Bunsen, 125 



Carlyle, Thomas, 62, 65, 76, 

86, 89 
— a final visit to, 103 
— his last days, 20 
— his love for his mother, 123 
Certitude in religion, 184 
Chalmers, Dr., 171 
Charity, the grace of, 109 
Chateaubriand on old age, 19 
Children, the blessing of, 52 
Christ, the recognition of God 

in, 192 
Cicero on old age, 9 
Clarke, Dr. Adam, 22 
Clough, Arthur, 88 
Coleridge, S. T., 67 
— Derwent, 143 
Consecration, the duty of, 99 
Content, the spirit of, 31 
Conversion, the necessity of, 

100 
Counsel, wise, 115 
Covetousness, 114 
Cowper, William, 91 
Crabbe, 56 

Dante, 5, 22, 89, 118, 129 

De Vere, Aubrey, 2 

Death, 143 

— and destiny, 88 

— the beneficence of, 145 

— the painlessness of, 144 

— what is? 147 



203 



204 



INDEX 



Desire, the presence of sin- 
cere, 190 
Devotional books, 64 
Dickens, Charles, on old age, 19 
Divine approach, the, 186 
Duty of consecration, the, 99 
— toward God, 91 
— toward our fellow men, 102 

Eliot, George, 37, 126 
Emerson, 18, 56, 130 
Entertainment, books of, 68 
Epictetus, 147 
Erskine, Thomas, 46 
Expectation, the absence of, 
in old age, 58 

Faber, 184 

Faith, the Christian's, 148 

Faraday, Michael, in old age, 

136 
Fellowships, perfect, 161 
Fiction, masters of, 68 
Forgiveness, in 
Fortune , the vicissitudes of , 3 2 
Franklin, Benjamin, 54, 104 

Garnett, Richard, 12 
Garrison, William Lloyd, 151 
Giving, wise, 114 
Gladstone, W. E., in old age, 

i39 
God, affiance in, 197 
— duties towards, 91 
— shelter in, 78 
God-consciousness, 186 
Goethe, 55, 86, 106 
Gordon's tomb, inscription 

on, 104 
Guthrie, Dr., in old age, 153 



Happiness in old age, 24 
— the duty of, 29 
Hare, Julius, 99 
Hazlitt on books, 61 
Health, physical, 25 
Heaven, occupation in, 159 
— the certainty of, 157 
Heavenly life, the, 155 
Helpfulness, the joy of, 72 
Helps, Sir Arthur, 74 
Hemans, Mrs., 162 
Henley, W. E., 19 
Herbert, 93 
History and Biography, uses 

of, 65 
Hobbes' translation of 

Homer, 44 
Holmes, Oliver Wendell, 90, 

170 
Home sanctities, 51 
Hope, immortal, 85 
Human interests, 27 

Imitation, The, by Thomas a 

Kempis, 63 
Immanence of God, the, 189 
Ingratitude, 92, 100 
Intellect, joy for the, 157 
Interests, variety of, 54 
Irish legend, an, 146 
Irving, Edward, 129 

Johnson, Dr., 19, 33, 60, 102, 

112, 135, 172 
Judgments, kind, no 

Keble, 73 

Kempis, Thomas a, 63 

Khayyam, Omar, 17 



INDEX 



205 



Kindness, active, 104 
— how it beautifies life, 126 
King Lear, lessons from, 40 
Kingsley, Charles, 158 

Lamartine, 87 

Lamb, Charles, on old age, 19 

Landor, Walter Savage, 30 

Lecky, W. E. H., on old age, 
20 

Leighton, Archbishop, 84 

Life as a school, 15 

Livingstone, David, in old 
age, 138 

Longevity, rules for the at- 
tainment of, 26 

Longfellow, 140, 143 

Lotze, 86 

Love and service, 74 

— the beauty of, 132 

Love's mastery, 128 

Macdonald, Dr. George, 50, 

73> 184 
— on old age, 21 
Margaret Ogilvy, 82 
Marriage, a true, 52 
Marston, P. B., 147 
Matheson, Dr., his prayer, 

144 
Melanchthon, the death of, 

152 
Memories, pleasant, 70 
— sad, 43 

Meredith, George, 174 
— Owen, 37 
Methodist Hymn-book, the, 

68, 
Michael Angelo, 80 



Milton, John, 106 
— in old age, 134 
Ministry, the opportunity for, 

105 
Money, the fascination of, 

114 
Montaigne, 9, 35, 46, 48, 119 
More, Sir Thomas, the death 

of, 152 
Morellet, the Abbe\ 2 1 
Mother, the aged, 123 

Napoleon I, 34 

Nature, illustrations from, 3 

—joy in, 55 

— the tranquillity of, 59 

Newman, Dr., 57 

Newton, Robert, the death 

of, 154 
Night, the beauty of, 60 

Obedience, moral, 194 
Old age and twilight, 3 
Oliphant, Mrs., 129 

Pagan view of old age, a, 9 
Paganini, a story of, 45 
Paget, Sir James, 145 
Pain, divine purpose in, 97 
Parker, Theodore, 170 
Payson, Dr., 130 
Phillips, Stephen, 118 
Pilgrim's Progress, The, 64 
Pleasures, pure, 50 
Plotinus, 88 

Poetry, the study of, 67 
Poets, some American, 67 
Pope, the consecration of a 
new, 1 7 



206 



INDEX 



Pope's care for his mother, 

123 
"Potter's Wheel, The," 98 
Poverty, the good of, 32 
Praise, the duty of, 92 
Prayer, frequent and secret, 

177 
Preparation, 170 
— methods of, 173 
Proctor, A. A., 111 
Pulsford, Dr., 80 
Punshon, Dr., on the fear of 

death, 30 
Purity, the bliss of, 160 

Raleigh, Sir Walter, the 
death of, 152 

Receptivity, a glad, 29 

Refreshment in nature, 58 

Regrets, vain, 43 

Religion and eventide, 76 

— certitude in, 184 

Religious reading, 65 

Resolve, fixed and magnifi- 
cent, 178 

Revelation, twilight the sea- 
son of, 7 

Richardson, Sir Benjamin, 25 

Richter, Jean Paul, 113 

Ronsard, 54 

Ruskin, John, 8, 18, 123 

Saladin, the death of, 1 7 
Sawyer, Sir John, 26 
Schiller, 12 
Scott, David, 29 
Service in old age, 108 
— the duty of, 103 
Shaftesbury, Lord, in old age, 
i37 



Shakespeare, 89, 145 
Shakespeare's King Lear, 40 
Shelley, Percy Bysshe, 68 
Sin, the destructive nature of, 

Smetham, James, 29 
Socrates and death, 88- 
Somerville, Mrs., 21 
Sorrow, attitude towards, 

37 
Spenser, Edmund, 125 
Stanley, Dean, 130 
Sterling, John, 45 
Stevenson, Robert Louis, 161 
Submission, meek, 35 
Swedenborg, Immanuel, 131, 

150 
Sympathy, 73 

Tallyrand, 44 
— his 83 rd birthday, 20 
Taylor, Jeremy, 50 
Temper, the question of, 39 
Tennyson, 89, 138, 158 
Thackeray, 18, 69 
Thankfulness, causes for, 93 
Tolstoi's Resurrection, 44 
Transition, the inevitable, 

i43 
Treasury of Sacred Song, The, 

68 
Tyndall's visit to Carlyle, 103 

Vision, the beatific, 166 

Voltaire, 18 

Watts, G. F., in old age, 

i39 
Weaver's prayer, the, 84 
Wesley, Charles, 85 
— in old age, 135 



INDEX 



207 



Wesley, John, 172 
— in old age, 134 
Whitman, Walt, 89 
Whittier, 7, 83, 102, 113, 151, 

200 
Wilberforce, William, 104, 164 
Will of God, acquiescence in 

the, 36 
Wise counsel, 115 
— giving, 114 



Wordsworth, William, 9, 21, 

3°> 55> 7°> 82 » 8 7» i° 6 
— in old age, 136 
— on books, 61 
Worldly interests, loss of, 

176 
Worry, the avoidance of, 

46 
Worship, the sanctities of, 

175 







Deacidified using the Bookkeeper process. 
Neutralizing agent: Magnesium Oxide 
Treatment Date: Dec. 2004 

PreservationTechnologies 

A WORLD LEADER IN PAPER PRESERVATION 

1 1 1 Thomson Park Drive 
Cranberry Township, PA 16066 
(724)779-2111 




o " 






v>. 



.0 



^ 




LIBRARY OF CONGRESS 




013 610 545 




HI 



